CBM 1.7 released

[WraithLord]

FYI. QM's latest CBM installment ver. 1.7 has been released.

For convenience here's the release notes quoting QM:
"
Changes:

*All titans (defined as size 6 humaniod pretenders with Dom 3+) spread dominion in their location much better than other pretenders

*Lord of Rebirth, Lord of Plenty and Mother of Rivers gem generation toned down

*Oracle new path cost increased.

*Soulless (from life after death) no longer have magic

*EA and MA Agartha heat preference +1, PD gives darkness at level 20

*EDM, WH 1.9, Mark of the Champion, and Armor Revamp merged into CB

*Skratti pretender boosted, minor cost tweaks to Enchantress and Great Druid

*Bane blades now reanimate those they kill as soulless

*Infernal disease 5 slaves -> 7 slaves

*MA Arco Chariot bug fix

*Virtue map move 4

*Wraith sword and hell sword cheaper

*New E booster replacing the now unique blood stone- 4e const6 Ring of Earth (unfortunately uses the slot of Boots of Antaeus)

*Jade Knife, Saguine Dousing Rod and Dwarven Hammer unique

*Forge of The Ancients now needs fire as well; MA Ulm has access to the spell at research level 0.

*Elemental Royalty all +1 to primary magic path

*Treelords autosummon vine men

*Iron angel more accessible for MA ulm

*Davana reset to base game price, Dakini 50 slaves -> 75

*Mackaka PD improved

*Unquenched sword cheaper

*EA Ulm shamen get astral (or rather, get astral back)

*Bell of Cleansing remade (more expensive, higher level, aoe but less damage)

*Blood and Conjuration sites with over 30% bonuses removed

*Kelp Fort rarer

*Frost and Fire Brand do slightly less damage

*LA Pyth reveler improved chance of blood/nature

EDM tweaks:

*Added AP to Roc beak

*Kraken, Asynja less magic

*Many small price tweaks

I'm not sure if I should call this a beta or a full release- there are some fairly radical changes here that need some testing, and no doubt some bugs as well. In any case, I'll try try to provide some justification for the more controversial changes.

On making SDRs, hammers and jade knives unique, the most obvious benefit is reduced micromanagement. Personally, I estimate around 1/4th of the time on my turns are probably a direct result of the first two items. For SDRs, they are also the most obvious way of combating the supremacy of blood in the absence of gem generators. Hammers on the other hand have the effect of making the typical 4e pretenders even more of a must. Toning down jade knives is the end mostly about nation balance, in short blood sacrifice nations already have a huge advantage, knives can really push them over the top in situations where they really should not have such an easy win.

Also, I'd like to thank all the people (Sombre, Llamabeast, Burnsaber, Endo) who made mods that were added to the CB mixture.

Download at: http://www.mediafire.com/?adyxdt2l566i6qn (sorry, I know it's full of popups)
"

[quantum_mechani]

In retrospect, I think the original thread should have been titled 'Don't Panic' in large friendly letters.

[chrispedersen]

Some good things here Qm...
I'm curious what the chariot fix for arco was..

the changes to *Jade Knife, Saguine Dousing Rod and Dwarven Hammer unique".. is huge change... much more than is apparanent.

An SDR essentialy gives a 40% chance of giving d6+l slaves - and since slaves.

Essentially this is about a 40% decrease in blood production for blood nations... Thats a pretty big hit.

Also, revelers are incredibly strong and did not need the increased chance. LAPyth is fairly strong. Curious to see how you made the darkness change to agartha. Autocast on a national commander at pd level 20 I'm betting.

[iRFNA]

Why would the master druid have its cost upped to 20 when the arch druid is still 15? Arch druid has one more base magic path (air), has recuperation, and is a +1 nature gem gen... vs the master druid having poison immunity, +4 research, and 2 ivy lord. Seems odd to me.

[Finalgenesis]

OOooOO Mdruid has path cost increased to 20? One of my favorites chasis! Then again it does come with EN, 2 very popular paths (and probably why it was nerfed).

I recall off the top of my head that arch druid is only available to the weaker nations (Eriu, Tir na nog ...etc)? So I guess it's kind of like a little bonus for them to get a better druid chasis? Arch dru don't have feet slots either so that's like a -1E for non-bless purposes (albeit minor, but does cost more points if you want to cast the higher lvl earth rituals).

[Executor]

I understand blood magic is a problem.
Rather than nefring blood so much maybe it could be made more accessible for everyone?

[iRFNA]

OOooOO Mdruid has path cost increased to 20? One of my favorites chasis! Then again it does come with EN, 2 very popular paths (and probably why it was nerfed).

I recall off the top of my head that arch druid is only available to the weaker nations (Eriu, Tir na nog ...etc)? So I guess it's kind of like a little bonus for them to get a better druid chasis? Arch dru don't have feet slots either so that's like a -1E for non-bless purposes (albeit minor, but does cost more points if you want to cast the higher lvl earth rituals).

Not path, just actual cost. Path cost is still 10, so the change is extremely small. I just thought it was odd, but I guess the arch druid being a rarer chassis makes sense.

[Dimaz]

It looks like MA Vanheim will be nerfed pretty hard with these changes.

[TheDemon]

I'm curious what the chariot fix for arco was..
They dual wielded Spear/Short Sword, but didn't have ambidex or bonus, so their Atk would be 4 for both weapons.

Obviously this isn't intentional.

[mighty_scoop]

I'm not the most experienced player, but if the reduction of micromanagment was the reason to make the dwarven hammer, the sdr and the jade knives unique wouldn't it be consistent to also make the owl quill and lightless latern unique ?

[WraithLord]

Yes, and while we're at it why don't make all items unique. Who needs forging MM anyway? ;)

As Calahan said in another thread this change actually takes away a piece of the game. It's a step in a good direction but seems to be, well, radical for one, and diminishes a good portion of the game for second.

I would have much preferred a solution involving 20 unique hammers - each with forge bonus and some flavor extra feature.

[mighty_scoop]

Sorry, this wasn't meant as a criticism for this step, rather it was a proposal for a further step to consequently reduce micromanagment.
The research items are the only very micromanagment intense items left.

[Dimaz]

Removing the need to research at all will definitely reduce MM.

[Kuritza]

I suggest making Claws of Cocytus and Infernal Prison 1-level spells, and introducing a 3-level astral version that banishes to the Void as well. Thus we'll finally get rid of SCs and national troops will be important all the time, even in the late game.

[llamabeast]

I would have much preferred a solution involving 20 unique hammers - each with forge bonus and some flavor extra feature.

That's a great idea Wraithlord, but can't be done. Item modding is very limited. It is impossible to create any new items which give a forge bonus.

Personally I am very pleased with pretty much all the changes. Lots of very difficult decisions have been taken, and certainly this will be a more controversial CBM. But personally I think that they are very good decisions.

Probably the most controversial is likely to be the Dwarven Hammer becoming unique. Quite a big change. In my opinion though, much like the removal of gem gens, this will be quite popular once we get over the shock to our strategies.

[Gandalf Parker]

Isnt MM one of those things that falls into the "then just dont use it" category? Not that Ive ever agreed with that but I heard it said to me often enough. Is it a game breaker that needs a game fix?

BTW are the developers of the other mods planning separate downloadable versions? :target:
Endgame Diversity and Worthy Heroes and Mark of the Champion?

[mighty_scoop]

Btw mods, could not find any info to the armor revamp mod. What is its purpose ?

[Warhammer]

I'm not sure I agree with some of the changes. I think the dwarven hammer is a huge change that will cascade through the game.

I love some of the things that CBM has done, but I scratch my head over some of it. I wonder if some of the changes are a scale thing. If you play on large maps, many of these things are great, but if you are playing on a tight map, I wonder if some of these things were an issue to begin with.

[Gandalf Parker]

And vice versa. Some things seem to me to be fixes for tight games.

Of course a comeback would be "did you speak up in the CBM threads". If the suggestions come from the same people playing the same game variants with the same players then its not their fault. (and yes I acknowledge not adding to the discussions)

[Joelz]

Btw mods, could not find any info to the armor revamp mod. What is its purpose ?

Quoting Sombre:
Q: *EDM, WH 1.9, Mark of the Champion, and Armor Revamp merged into CB
Someone kindly care to summarize what Mark of the Champion and Armor Revamp do?

A: Armour revamp decreases the enc gap between the lightest and heaviest armours, shrinking it from 0-5 generally to about 0-3. This primarily makes the heavier armours better in terms of enc. It also makes weightless and lightweight scale armours a lot better. Mark of the Champion turns the reward for winning the arena into a misc item which grants quickness, a cool helmet and a flying trident, iirc.

[Gandalf Parker]

ahh thanks for that.
The Armor Revamp seemed new to me. Now I understand.
The only reason I didnt list it in the request for separation is that Ive never had a game request it separately yet

[llamabeast]

Actually I'm pretty sure Mark of the Champion turns the arena reward into a helmet rather than a misc item. This is good as generally the helmet slot is not particularly useful. The Mark of the Champion, by contrast, has good protection, grants Quickness, and gives a floating trident companion as a bonus attack to the wearer.

[Joelz]

Actually I'm pretty sure Mark of the Champion turns the arena reward into a helmet rather than a misc item. This is good as generally the helmet slot is not particularly useful. The Mark of the Champion, by contrast, has good protection, grants Quickness, and gives a floating trident companion as a bonus attack to the wearer.
Just tested this myself. The Mark of the Champion is indeed a helmet.

[chrispedersen]

My personal opinion is that the arena item now is too strong.
Having had to kill the wielder of it, I can tell you its real difficult in the early to mid game.

Essentially it allows many nations to field about an SC quality cmdr real early in the game. Suggest you prophetize a dai oni, or ulm lord - or even a man warden - give him 5-10 gems worth of items - and then try to bring him down.

In the armor revamps - I think Jomonese armor offers too much protection, for its encumbrance/defense penalty/map move.

I find ulm too strong. Never thought I'd say that. The combination of forge, plus having forge bonuses when no one else can access dwarven hammers is strong.
Throw in the changes to the armor and the astral .....

[llamabeast]

I find it unlikely that the Mark of the Champion is too strong, simply because it is so risky to acquire. If it motivates people to fight hard to win the Arena fight, I think that's awesome!

[iRFNA]

An interesting thing to note about the dwarven hammer change... You've actually nerfed forge bonus units that were given dwarven hammers. Consider how it is now, where we have the typical forge bonus nation with 25% reduction vs normal forging. So they pay 75% cost for items, other nations pay 100%: 25% forge bonus nations get 4 items of the same cost for every 3 that a normal nation can forge. If both nations have access to hammers, forge bonus nations are paying 50% cost while normal nations pay 75% cost. That means, with access to hammers, forge bonus nations get 3 items of the same cost for every 2 that a normal nation can forge.

Not saying it's right or wrong, just pointing out something that could be overlooked.

Also, I think the no research forge of the ancients is where balancing ulm veers into overkill territory.

[Valerius]

I'll preface this by saying that I've only looked over the change log, not yet tested the mod, and that I'm in biased in favor of anything that reduces micro. At first I wasn't too enthusiastic about the changes (especially because they hit my favored glamour nations hard) but after thinking it over I think there are some good things here - though I do have some concerns.


SDRs: the thing with SDRs isn't the additional blood slave on a successful check but the fact that the chance of a successful check for a B1 mage is dramatically increased. So nations that are rely on non-cap B1 mages for blood hunting take a much bigger hit with the elimination of SDRs than nations that rely on B2+ non-cap blood hunters. Nations with cheap B1 mages (Mictlan) can more easily compensate for the lack of SDRs than nations with expensive B1 mages (Vanheim) but they are still impacted. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, as I'm in the camp that thinks blood magic is OP. My concern is with a blood nation like Niefelheim that relies on B2+ non cap blood hunters and isn't really hurt much by this - they actually gain in power relative to other blood nations. So I'd like to see what is effectively a nerf to blood magic applied evenly. The solution can vary depending on the nation in question. As far as Niefel/Jotun go I rather like the idea of changing Skratti paths from W2B2 +100%WDNB to W2B1 +100%WDNB (which has the added bonus of making it harder for them to cast thug/SC killing Life for a Life and Claws of Kokytos in the late game).

Note: I'm assuming the elimination of SDRs wasn't just intended to reduce micro but to nerf blood. If it was only intended to reduce micro then giving dousing bonuses to blood mages would equalize things again (though it would make a nation like Mictlan in particular more powerful by eliminating the need for the time/cost of making SDRs for their massed blood hunters).


Dwarven hammers: Just as with SDRs the elimination of hammers does not effect all nations equally. Sure, every nation ends up using them for forging but not all nations suffer equally from their removal. Nations that need to equip thugs or forge boosters cheaply are impacted much more than nations who don't rely on those things as much. Now of course, everyone eventually needs SCs but here I don't think eliminating hammers has as much impact. The additional forging cost as a percentage of total summoning/forging cost without a hammer is smaller than the 50% increase in cost in equipping a Sidhe Lord with a frost brand and vine shield.

Still, I do like this change as long as the fact that it hurts some nations more than others is taken into consideration. I think forge bonuses ranging from 10-15% to 25% on the appropriate mages of nations that are most effected by the lack of hammers can be both thematic and differentiate them more than hammers ever did. In cases where it really isn't thematic to grant a forge bonus another boost could be considered.


Fire/Frost Brands: I don't really get the nerf of these, especially in conjunction with the elimination of hammers making them more expensive to forge. Sure, they're popular multi-purpose weapons but I don't think that in itself qualifies them for nerfing. And this change, like with hammers, impacts thugs (especially human strength thugs) more than SCs. The frost brand nerf is particularly grievous since that weapon isn't even armor piercing. At the old damage level a Sidhe Lord's chances if they ran into a bane lord weren't good - with this change they are pretty much non-existent. Heck, their chances against any kind of decently armored troop go down sharply. And when a nation only has one trick having that trick nerfed is painful... Really, this change seems like it's intended to solve a non-existent problem.


Ulm's FotA: If I had to pick one change I think will not last this is it. Sure, Ulm has problems but giving them a level 0 version of one of the most powerful spells in the game doesn't seem the way to solve it and I think will just be abused. Though it will work against Ulm in one sense: the logical thing to do would be to dogpile them before they can get a chance to really start reaping the benefits of their FotA. If I were starting a game today this is the one thing I would definitely change.


Last thing: all of the above is intended to be constructive input. I certainly appreciate the work QM has put into the mod and major changes are always going to need some testing and balancing. And of course I've got my own biases: changes that hurt my favorite nations are going to prompt me to respond but when CBM 1.6 eliminated the clams I disliked so much I didn't have any complaints.

[Executor]

Some thoughts on the new CBM,

I think the problem with removing the hammers is that it will make certain items ridiculously overpriced. For example, it will be much easier to forge the Chalice than to forge a ring of wizardry.
I think this will make even wishing or getting access to Tartarians a very demanding task. (not that a harder access to Tarts is a bad idea)
No doubt it will greatly downsize the usage of mid game thugs which already pretty much only concentrates on nations that can utilize their commanders as thugs (Eriu/Van/Jotun...).
I rarely see summonable thugs such as Bane Lords, Firbolg etc... and this will just make it harder for them to use.

Now I suspect all of this can be compensated with games being created with a higher site frequency, but than again, better diversed nations would get much greater benefits from this.
I'm getting off track a bit, so with removing the hammers, some other items need price changing too.

As for brend weapons, why not change the Shadow brend too than? It's the best out of the 3, it's far superior to the water brend which has taken a hit as it seems as, and isn't even AP. And besides, water brend remains still the easiest one to counter with using just a little undead chaff, so I don't see the point in reducing its damage.

And I agree with Valerius about the SDR. Nations like Van already have a much harder time blood hunting with the expensive mages that require both a lab and a temple, and now with removing SDR you're just giving too much power to Mictlan, Jotunheim, Lanka... Maybe giving certain commanders a blood hunting bonus, or increasing paths, or adding a random paths, or reducing blood paths to some other nations.

Infernal disease is still way under priced, any other assassination spell are far more expensive than this one, and even harder to acquire, be it seeking arrow, manifestation, earth attack... 7 blood slaves is still very little, since even with the blood nefr empowering and forging blood booster is much cheaper than for other magic types.

And last, the fire summon Zmey is still pretty much useless it seems.

[Zeldor]

Even QM admitted Infernal Disease is too cheap, so it should be changed for final version of CBM [1.7 looks like beta, so there is hope for change, so we should make suggestions :)].

And yeah, some items need price fixes [but that means lowering paths needed to forge them - it may be not so bad with more expensive boosters though]. It will be mostly 25 and 40 gem items, which were very expensive and rarely used even with 25% forge discount.

Would anyone now forge Stymphalan Wings, Bone Armor, Jade Mask, Armor of Invulnerability or even Gate Stone?

[iRFNA]

On the mark of the champion... Would it really "not be worth it" if the weapon part was removed and it became a 5 prot helmet with quickness? In most cases for thugs/SCs, there isn't even an artifact you can forge that is as useful. It would certainly be worth fighting for. Why add so much extra power to a single item? I understand the argument that you want people to really try for it, but if you really want people to do anything for it, you might as well give it every stat bonus from every item in the game. Surely the prot and quickness would be easily sufficient without being so insanely overpowered?

[LDiCesare]

I think those changes are all geared towards end-game in many-nations large games.
The only big change I think is ok is the restriction of sanguine dousing rods.

[Fantomen]

I understand the thinking behind those changes, but this is not the type of update to CBM I had hoped for to be honest.

The last CBM changed the game radically by removing gemgens, this was a good thing. And the big changes here might be too. But there is a problem with big changes, they need a long time getting used to and ruins lots of strategies.

I would prefer to put those big radical changes on hold for a while, and instead see a update to CBM with all the small fixes and non-controversial changes that has been discussed in the thread.

My suggesstion would be to release a less controversial CBM 1.6.2 while this one is tested.

[rdonj]

On the mark of the champion... Would it really "not be worth it" if the weapon part was removed and it became a 5 prot helmet with quickness? In most cases for thugs/SCs, there isn't even an artifact you can forge that is as useful. It would certainly be worth fighting for. Why add so much extra power to a single item? I understand the argument that you want people to really try for it, but if you really want people to do anything for it, you might as well give it every stat bonus from every item in the game. Surely the prot and quickness would be easily sufficient without being so insanely overpowered?

lolwut? The champion item needs to make its user STRONGER, not weaker, which your 5 prot helmet would do in 99% of cases. In order to be an incentive to actually send capable commanders into the arena, rather than just cheap throwaways, the item obtained should actually be valuable. Mark of the champion encourages actually caring about winning the arena, and sending valuable commanders in with the chance of losing them. For a 5 prot helmet, it would seldom be worth it.

[iRFNA]

I didn't really type that well. It uses the armor flame helmet, which is a 20 prot helmet that also raises your base prot to (by?) 5. On top of this it has quickness.

edit:
I did a quick test, and the flame helmet will raise a unit from 12 base body protection to 16, so it's of use to units even with a high base protection.

[PriestyMan]

I didn't really type that well. It uses the armor flame helmet, which is a 20 prot helmet that also raises your base prot to (by?) 5. On top of this it has quickness.

edit:
I did a quick test, and the flame helmet will raise a unit from 12 base body protection to 16, so it's of use to units even with a high base protection.

And? so it adds some prot. wow. quickness and an attack. its still good, not amazing. not even close to overpowered

[Finalgenesis]

An interesting option would be something similar to Edi's piecemeal edition CBM 1.6, by making the most controversial changes optional.

For example, hammer uniques, it could be if certain players want the to have hammer allocation and planning in the game they can turn it on. Users could customize a game to what they want. Want a dumbed down minimal micro game? Hammer off, booster off ...etc

Though that might cause balancing descrepencies, say if some earth nations were adjusted and weaker thug nations getting forge ability (Eriu, TNN...etc) then you turn hammer on ... Or certain nation getting hammered with no booster access.

[TheConway]

An interesting option would be something similar to Edi's piecemeal edition CBM 1.6, by making the most controversial changes optional.

For example, hammer uniques, it could be if certain players want the to have hammer allocation and planning in the game they can turn it on. Users could customize a game to what they want. Want a dumbed down minimal micro game? Hammer off, booster off ...etc

Though that might cause balancing descrepencies, say if some earth nations were adjusted and weaker thug nations getting forge ability (Eriu, TNN...etc) then you turn hammer on ... Or certain nation getting hammered with no booster access.

This is pretty easy to do already. Just spend 10 minutes with the modding manual and a text editor. You can remove the pieces you dislike, save it as a new document, and use it for your customized game.

[Numahr]

(Almost) removing hammers is a radical move, but one which is perfectly in line with the concept of the Mod, I think: it removes an "obvious", no-brainer option that was almost mandatory for competitiveness.

As a major side effect, it decreases accessibility of magic items. My personal view, but this is very personal, is that spells were not competitive enough as an option to spend gems compared to items, so I tend to like this. But this is a "flavour" consideration, where I wished that magic items were really exceptional rather than produced at an industrial scale by chains of impersonal hammer-handlers.

So I think the hammer thing is a rather interesting one, in spite of the balance issues it raises.

[earcaraxe]

i want to add to this discussion that in smaller games (which i tend to play only (6-8 players)) the hammer-micro doesnt feel burdensome for me at all. It means about 6-10 hammers to manage, and for me in these cases the raise in complexity and planning required (makes game more interesting for me) overweights the cost (moving the hammers back and forth between mages) (there are other costs too).

However removing the hammers not only lessens micro but makes items more expensive, i would really like to test it to see how it changes the game, as i like to use low-level summons, and perhaps it will make using them more optimal.

one aspect i like in this change (and in the SDR one) is that i dont have to wait until constr4 (SDR or earth boots or having enough hammers) to forge some items for my commanders and still play near optimal.

And one more: there is a kind of argument versus banning the hammers (the hammer-banner :) ): that people will use the same amount of gems for items, meaning removing the hammers will lessen the number of gems spent on not-forging. It is the same argument used against raising the cost of tartarians. And this type of argument can be used versus raising the price of gas, saying "people will buy gas into their cars anyway, so they will have less money for food". I'm not saying that its a false statement, but I'm sceptical.

The SDR change will affect nations with noncapital bloodhunters much less then the other blood nations, because the SDR could be viewed as a forgeable bloodhunter (with about a little more than 1 level in B). It will weaken all blood nations without doubt and will make low level blood spells more used, because it was seen an optimal way in most cases to not start hunting until SDRs and constr 4, and by this time the research tipically can jump thru the first couple levels in the blood tree.

All in all i personally like both of the hammer and the SDR change.

I'm not sure integrating the edm AND changing it a bit to fit your taste (u said u dont like easy magic diversity) was a good idea (it may not be only your taste tho). Regarding the changes: lessening the magic diversity of the new monsters strengthens the tartarians in their status (as they have diversity). It might turn out to be an excellent idea tho, im looking forward of the test results.

Thanks for the bold changes QM and updating the mod. I'm very curious of its effect on the game.

[Festin]

I understand the thinking behind those changes, but this is not the type of update to CBM I had hoped for to be honest.

The last CBM changed the game radically by removing gemgens, this was a good thing. And the big changes here might be too. But there is a problem with big changes, they need a long time getting used to and ruins lots of strategies.

I would prefer to put those big radical changes on hold for a while, and instead see a update to CBM with all the small fixes and non-controversial changes that has been discussed in the thread.

My suggesstion would be to release a less controversial CBM 1.6.2 while this one is tested.

I fully agree with this. Removing gemgens was a radical change, and it worked, but it does not mean that CBM needs as many radical changes as possible. EDM, hammers, SDRs - aren't there too many controversial and drastic changes for one release? Any single one of them would be radical enough.

On the other side of things, including Armor Revamp is great (well, I hope so, didn't test it yet), new E booster, Bane Blade change and Trelord boost are great too, Agartha and Machaka boosts are always good, same with Iron Angels for Ulm (the Forge thing... uh, I dunno).

But, to sum it up, this version has too few nation balance changes allowing us to use previously obscure units, spells, etc, too few obviously needed and non-controversial changes (like removing upkeep on Ghost General), and too many massive and mostly unnecessary changes. This is all only my opinion, of course.

[NooBliss]

I find it strange that while it's called a conceptual BALANCE mod it doesnt try to fix balance, focusing on micromanagement and flavor instead.
Take, for example, Sauromatian poison archers. They are bugged and impossible to fix, thus their unerring arrows became a feature. Shouldn't they cost more to reflect that?

[Zeldor]

Festin:

So compile a list of changes that should appear. I am going to prepare one too and try convincing QM that he should make them :)

I am not sure about forge bonuses on some national mages, but it may work. It'd be cool to have some nations with N magic forge bonus.

[Festin]

The changes I am referring to were discussed for a long, long time both here and on the other forum, and I tried to contribute to it. Now, instead of all those things that were proposed since it was assumed that the discussion will be noticed, we get a Hammer Ban From Nowhere. I'm sorry, but I currently feel a bit de-motivated.

[Redeyes]

I find it strange that while it's called a conceptual BALANCE mod it doesnt try to fix balance, focusing on micromanagement and flavor instead.
Take, for example, Sauromatian poison archers. They are bugged and impossible to fix, thus their unerring arrows became a feature. Shouldn't they cost more to reflect that?

What mod are you playing? Androphag archers have a gold cost two thirds times higher than their baseline.

[NooBliss]

Ah. Indeed; its just that (almost nothing) * 3/2 = (still incredibly cheap for unerring poison arrows). :) My bad.

[Dimaz]

I feel CBM goes to the wrong direction starting with gemgen removal in 1.6. I never fully agreed to that change as it only removes from the game and adds nothing. I agree however that gemgens had to be nerfed for large games where there were hundreds of them on each side; still there are solutions to that problem that I think are more acceptable. House rules for example. Usually each starting game has some rules like not abusing LaD or not preventing movement with scouts etc. One of them could be not to build more gemgens of each type than the current turn number. Or not more than 50. Whatever. And the winner has to upload the turn archive for everyone to see that he wasn't cheating.
But when CBM removed them completely, it was too much. They represented the concept of economic investment in the game along with generating globals, SDRs and hammers. You either spend your gems now to get immediate result or invest them to get more later. And it was an important strategic choice as overinvesting can leave you without gems to deal with immediate threat.
As I said, this investment in gemgens wasn't really balanced as after initial wars it was an optimal choice in 99% cases to build more of them instead of spending. But CBM removed the choice at all instead of dealing with the problem in subtler ways.
Now the same thing happened to SDRs and hammers. I think this items add important part to gameplay as economic investment; without them we have less strategic choices. Again, I agree that after gemgen removal blood became a bit too powerful; however dealing with it in such manner is too much I think. When I played blood nations I had a choice to move into blood or research const 4 first; now it's gone. Perhaps SDRs are too cheap for what they do so maybe they should be moved to b2 - this way they will be fogeable only by more powerful mages and the mageturns for them will enter the equation; more choices as the result. As for DH, I think they are perfectly fine as they are, being the only investment in 1.6 that gives back gems of all kinds and not only of it's own.
And the MM argument is the strangest thing I've ever heard. I spend hours on late game turns and about 30-90 mins on midgame when I'm in a war - directly to click things, and who knows how much time during work day to make plans. And even with blood-heavy hations it's only about 10 minutes on huge maps to transport slaves and give items to guys that need them - I tend to forge items when I already have the unit for them. Most of the time goes into watching battles, planning, scripting and moving armies around, counting gems to give for bf spells and to scouts... Honestly, I don't think moving hammers around takes more than 5% of all the time on the turn.

[Corinthian]

I kind of agree with Dimaz that the two most recent versions have made way to big changes. The only gem gen that was problematic was the clam of pearls. The fever fetish caused disease and fire gems are rather worthless anyhow. The bloodstone was overpowered but also extremely hard to get. In fact, I can't think of a single nation that can build them without empowering or designing your pretender to build them.

All these balance problems could have been fixed by changing their cost or their build requirements. Removing them was much to drastic.

The latest version have the same problem. If an item is problematic, make it more expensive. Make it less of an must have item. That way nations that really need them can still have them and those that felt forced to use them can consider if it's worth it.

If you want to make MA Ulm more competitive you could make their black knights cheaper. As it stands even sacred cavalry like that of EA ermor and MA T'ien Ch'i cost less then the black knights and sacred cavalry is way powerful with a big fire bless.

I also did not like the general archer nerf. It made some archers, like Jomon longbows and agathar crossbows less useful then many indys.

Otherwise it's a great mod. Keep up the good work.

[TheConway]

I kind of agree with Dimaz that the two most recent versions have made way to big changes. The only gem gen that was problematic was the clam of pearls. The fever fetish caused disease and fire gems are rather worthless anyhow. The bloodstone was overpowered but also extremely hard to get. In fact, I can't think of a single nation that can build them without empowering or designing your pretender to build them.

All these balance problems could have been fixed by changing their cost or their build requirements. Removing them was much to drastic.

The latest version have the same problem. If an item is problematic, make it more expensive. Make it less of an must have item. That way nations that really need them can still have them and those that felt forced to use them can consider if it's worth it.

If you want to make MA Ulm more competitive you could make their black knights cheaper. As it stands even sacred cavalry like that of EA ermor and MA T'ien Ch'i cost less then the black knights and sacred cavalry is way powerful with a big fire bless.

I also did not like the general archer nerf. It made some archers, like Jomon longbows and agathar crossbows less useful then many indys.

Otherwise it's a great mod. Keep up the good work.

The issue with gem gens is that A- the nations that "needed" them weren't necessarily the ones that got them easily (ulm, agartha, BL) and while they might make a legitimate choice in the early-mid game, they were quite seriously no brainers in the end game and made for ridiculous situations where nations would be casting multiple wishes for gems to forge more gem gens to wish for more gems. SDRs work in almost the same way as gem gens, are far easier to produce, and are even more of a no-brainer. Sure you could up their paths to b3 and cost 15 slaves, but you'd still probably end up making them since it only takes max 4-5 turns for that to pay off. Hammers are definitely a somewhat different case, but I'm wary of immediate condemnation until some testing is done, regardless of any theorycraft-driven alarmism.

Agree that MA Ulm buffs could go farther, there's really no way to raise them above bottom tier unless qm is willing to break some thematic eggs, which doesn't seem to be the case.

I have no idea what you mean about a general archer nerf. Explain?

[Redeyes]

The bloodstone was overpowered but also extremely hard to get. In fact, I can't think of a single nation that can build them without empowering or designing your pretender to build them.
There's a fair amount of nations that can do it with recruitable mages, or using nothing but path boosters.
A full list would be: Marignon, Hinnom, Gath, Abysia, Vanheim and and Pangaea. For all these nations mass-constructing blood stones was a dominant strategy.

Anyway, if you want gemgenerators brought back in it is very easy to mod it back and it (like all changes in the mod) are the houserules visualized by a few players, it's a given that it isn't going to be a perfect fit for all games. My opinion is that the gemgenerators always become problematic in longer games (PBEMs almost by definition!)

Your comments on MA Ulm is fair, Ulms troops might be superior in some ways but it isn't actually a strength when their units cost so much (Royal Guard to Black Knights?)

Although, I think there's plenty of other nations that perhaps should be buffed before (or at the same time) Ulm.

[Redeyes]

I'm glad that the dominant magical sites were removed (e.g Ultimate Gateway) but from the last discussion we had about them I thought it would be more controversial.

[Happyfungi]

I have not checked the thread in the other board, but has anyone noticed that zmey tail weapon and roc beak weapon both share #915.

[TheDemon]

I'm glad that the dominant magical sites were removed (e.g Ultimate Gateway) but from the last discussion we had about them I thought it would be more controversial.

If he wanted to remove dominant magic sites he should have removed them all. Now that EDM is included, a 20% discount in ANY area can be gamebreaking. 20% const now that hammers are gone is too good. Not to mention the most broken site (20% alt) is still in. Really the only non-dominant discount sites are the evo sites and I say if you want to remove discount sites for balance you should go all the way.

[Corinthian]

I have no idea what you mean about a general archer nerf. Explain?

Archers have been nerfed in several waves in the previous versions.
First they nerfed the general melee capabilities of archers.(att/def) This was somewhat justified in that it made flanking cavalry more effective and archers arent suposed to beat cavalry in melee. (Looking at the latest change log I cant actually find this so they might have reverted it again?)

Second they nerfed ranged units by making all common ranged weapons except slings and short bows more expensive in resources.

Third they made several units either more expensive or weaker. (Rangers of Ulm, Jomon longbows, bakemono archers (though they also got smaller so it evens out), more?)

[Corinthian]

If he wanted to remove dominant magic sites he should have removed them all. Now that EDM is included, a 20% discount in ANY area can be gamebreaking. 20% const now that hammers are gone is too good. Not to mention the most broken site (20% alt) is still in. Really the only non-dominant discount sites are the evo sites and I say if you want to remove discount sites for balance you should go all the way.

Personally I don't care much about this kind of balance. Why? Because the game is in free for all form. If someone plays a powerful nation or get a good start the other players will take notice and gang up on him.
Also the random starting conditions and available magic sites means things will never be fair so what does one more random thing mater.
If a nation that was already powerful finds the ultimate gate? Well chances were that he would probably win any how. If a weak nation finds it? Why that might just be the thing that turns his game around! Making it harder to tell the victor in advance and making the game interesting for longer!

Either way, even the ultimate gate probably contributes less to your victory chances then your starting position. Take your SA lets play for an example. Ashdod, with all the god percentage sites in the first province they find, could not have salvaged Ermors terrible starting position.

Also on another note. I found both the bottomless lake (conj 20) and the ultimate gate (conj 50) in the same province. Unfortunately they don't stack:(

On a third note while I'm at it: Claymen really should be fire resistant. They are made of clay! Also golems are fire immune.

[TheConway]

I have no idea what you mean about a general archer nerf. Explain?

Archers have been nerfed in several waves in the previous versions.
First they nerfed the general melee capabilities of archers.(att/def) This was somewhat justified in that it made flanking cavalry more effective and archers arent suposed to beat cavalry in melee. (Looking at the latest change log I cant actually find this so they might have reverted it again?)

Second they nerfed ranged units by making all common ranged weapons except slings and short bows more expensive in resources.

Third they made several units either more expensive or weaker. (Rangers of Ulm, Jomon longbows, bakemono archers (though they also got smaller so it evens out), more?)

looking at the first post changelogs for both 1.6 and 1.5 i am unable to see any sort of archer nerf besides the well deserved Androphag Archer cost increase. If you found this in the code yourself then okay.

[Finalgenesis]

Submitting forging suggestion for discussion:

Weightless Scale Mail : A2 -> A1

Moon blade : 2 handed -> 1 handed; S1 -> S2 or lower stats? (I mean, even sandhyabala has 1-handed moon blades...)

Ring of the warrior : B1 -> B2

Flesh eater axe : B1 -> B2

Bane blade (2H) : remove for slots? Would people actually craft this reasonably often over the 1H version with the new changes? Hmmm...

Bone Armor : D5 -> D4

Wraith Crown : D5 -> D4

Robe of Invulnerability : E5 -> E4

Frost brand : W1 -> W2, AoE dam restoration arguable

Lantern shield: D2F1 -> D1F1

Where I'm on the fence for in varying degrees, and where 1 lvl price drop seem excessive:

Amulet of Missile Protection

Rod of the Phoenix - Already used in games, but with hammer changes I think I may never see them again, even as a specific counter. FR and a leadership boost maybe?

Stymphalian Wings

Axe of Hate -(The fatigue damage is not AoE it seems, has to hit) - and honestly, I see kryss used as SC slayer over axe of hate 100% of the time.

Sword of Swiftness

The above with some exception (frost brand, blood items...etc) are items I've never or very rarely seen used in the MP games I played in (admittedly not very many... ), it's always the same ol' couple of items. The worst are weapons and shields, whereas armor and helm and to lesser degree boots are more varied. I wished more items are made more viable whereas there are some clear optimal winners now that everyone uses, in the footstep of herald lance change from S2 -> S1 in CBM 1.6 which was excellent. Given hammer changes, the never-seen items will probably get even more never-seen.

For frost brand, it just has amazing utility for an amazingly cheap price, AoE, decent weapon stats and CR 50 in a 1-handed package for 5 measly water gems? Objectively speaking its far and away better then most weapons out there overall without any doubt. Firebrand is likewise amazing and even heaps AP, but I can convince myself its a cross-path item bonus and already cost 10 gems.

As for blood items, maybe the blood hunt nerf is enough, but I still think 5 blood slaves for decent usable items are way too cheap.

[Peter Ebbesen]

I'm glad that the dominant magical sites were removed (e.g Ultimate Gateway) but from the last discussion we had about them I thought it would be more controversial.
I hate that change.

I like the existence of unique magical sites that, if discovered, can radically change the game for the one discovering them. Sites that are so powerful that they can become specific targets for serious warfare if knowledge of their presence in a game spreads.

But then, I hate most of the changes made in CBM until now that do not either attempt to address bugs or attempt to balance nations or pretenders by changing nation and pretender specific information.

The sweeping changes in CBM to more general gameplay aspects available to most or all nations tend to reduce the game's strategic diversity in favour of balance through reduced randomness and a general homogenization process of power levels.

Which may be great for the large scale games CBM seems principally designed for with players who don't like for anybody to gain a benefit that they haven't worked hard for, but does reduce the fun quotient somewhat for the smaller scale MP games I participate in. SDR and Hammers as uniques are another example of things where the changes don't make much sense when the scale (both in map size, number of players, and expected length of game) is smaller.

OTOH, since I'm not the one making the mod, I really have little room for *****ing. If this sort of thing is what those who play games on the Shrapnel boards want, great! I'll just do my best to try not to use it in the games I play. (I may well fail - we are using CBM 1.6 now despite my wish to stick with 1.5 :D)

-------------

I do wonder about the earth booster, though. Given that CBM has already killed off gem generators except as uniques, why was a perfectly good and fun artefact, the Boots of Antaeus, replaced in favour of a Ring of the Earth booster rather than stripping the blood stone of its gem generating ability and newfound uniqueness (the simplest solution) or, if such was impossible (if the gem generation was in the game code and couldn't be modded), why not choose to replace some low-priority magic item that is almost never used such as Boots of Long Strides or the Main Gauche of Parrying?

[Stavis_L]

Weightless Scale Mail : A2 -> A1

You do realize this would obsolete Lightweight Scale Mail? Not that that's necessarily bad...


Moon blade : 2 handed -> 1 handed; S1 -> S2 or lower stats? (I mean, even sandhyabala has 1-handed moon blades...)


Moving to 1-hand would definitely open up to potential situational use...


Ring of the warrior : B1 -> B2
Flesh eater axe : B1 -> B2


Do people make rings of the warrior? RE: the axe - how would it then compare vs. the heart finder?


Bane blade (2H) : remove for slots? Would people actually craft this reasonably often over the 1H version with the new changes? Hmmm...


It would be worth it to keep the AI from forging them.

I think that 1H bane blade + shield is pretty much always better than the 2hand version, which leaves its utility down to units you were going to give a magic weapon to that don't already have shields and you don't want to invest another 5 gems into...


Bone Armor : D5 -> D4

Wraith Crown : D5 -> D4

Robe of Invulnerability : E5 -> E4

Frost brand : W1 -> W2, AoE dam restoration arguable


All of these seem reasonable, in light of hammer removal. However, consider the impact of forging the hammer of the forge lord or hammer (potentially + forge lord pretender and/or early FoTA from Ulm) to churn out the above items.


Lantern shield: D2F1 -> D1F1


At that price, people might be include to do it just to get the corpse candles at the edge of the field.


Where I'm on the fence for in varying degrees, and where 1 lvl price drop seem excessive:

Amulet of Missile Protection


Note that at 2A it's the same price as the air-based shields.


Rod of the Phoenix - Already used in games, but with hammer changes I think I may never see them again, even as a specific counter. FR and a leadership boost maybe?

Stymphalian Wings

Axe of Hate -(The fatigue damage is not AoE it seems, has to hit) - and honestly, I see kryss used as SC slayer over axe of hate 100% of the time.

Sword of Swiftness


For the Sword of Swiftness, perhaps adding +1 or more attacks would be a better re-balance vs. a price drop?

[llamabeast]

I do wonder about the earth booster, though. Given that CBM has already killed off gem generators except as uniques, why was a perfectly good and fun artefact, the Boots of Antaeus, replaced in favour of a Ring of the Earth booster rather than stripping the blood stone of its gem generating ability and newfound uniqueness (the simplest solution) or, if such was impossible (if the gem generation was in the game code and couldn't be modded), why not choose to replace some low-priority magic item that is almost never used such as Boots of Long Strides or the Main Gauche of Parrying?

None of your suggestions can be done with dom3's modding capabilities You can't take gem gen off the blood stone, and you can't add earth booster ability to other items. QM is working within considerable restrictions.

[Corinthian]

looking at the first post changelogs for both 1.6 and 1.5 i am unable to see any sort of archer nerf besides the well deserved Androphag Archer cost increase. If you found this in the code yourself then okay.

My sources for the changes are mostly the 1.5 changelog. Here is a few excerpts:

--Weapons and Armor--

-Crossbow-
Resource cost: 6 (4)

-Agarthan Steel Crossbow-
Resource cost: 10 (6)

-Composite Bow-
Resource cost: 5 (4)

-Long Bow-
Resource cost: 5 (4)

-Samurai Archer-
Gold cost: 12 (11)
Morale: 10 (11)
Precision: 10 (11)

-Ranger-
Gold cost: 13 (12)


I also found some more nerfed archers when I looked again.

-Vanara Archer-
Defense: 9 (10)
Attack: 9 (10)

-Bandar Archer-
Morale: 10 (12)
Attack: 10 (11)
Defense: 8 (9)
Hit points: 17 (18)

--Marignon MA--


-Crossbowman-
Morale: 10 (11)
Attack: 8 (10)
Defense: 8 (10)

--Sauromatia--


-Archer-
Gold cost: 11 (10)

-Ulm EA-


-Archer-
Hit points: 11 (12)
Strength: 10 (11)
Morale: 10 (11)
Map movement: 1 (2)
Changed short sword for dagger
Removed stealth

-Warrior Maiden-
Gold cost: 14 (12)
Precision: 11 (12)
Morale: 11 (12)

[Stavis_L]

I do wonder about the earth booster, though. Given that CBM has already killed off gem generators except as uniques, why was a perfectly good and fun artefact, the Boots of Antaeus, replaced in favour of a Ring of the Earth booster rather than stripping the blood stone of its gem generating ability and newfound uniqueness (the simplest solution) or, if such was impossible (if the gem generation was in the game code and couldn't be modded), why not choose to replace some low-priority magic item that is almost never used such as Boots of Long Strides or the Main Gauche of Parrying?

You can't mod either the magic boost attribute or the gem-gen attribute. That means that you only had the Boots of Antaeus, Pebble Skin Suit, or Tome of Gaia to choose from as existing earth boosters; QM chose the boots, presumably because its accompanying non-moddable side-effects (the re-invigoration/regeneration) were easiest to address.

Otherwise you'd have either had trollification + stoneskin (in the case of the armor) or +1 nature magic too (for the tome.) Personally, I'd have gone for the armor, but that's because I find the mechanic amusing :-)

If he only had *NINJAS* working for him, they could slip into Illwinter's offices and insert the necessary code mods...alas.

[Peter Ebbesen]

None of your suggestions can be done with dom3's modding capabilities You can't take gem gen off the blood stone, and you can't add earth booster ability to other items. QM is working within considerable restrictions.
Thanks! I suspected the first restriction but was ignorant of the second. I guess that in those circumstances it really does make sense to destroy one of my favourite artefacts (sob!) in favour of a generic path booster if it has been determined that a second generic earth booster is essential.

(I am tempted to argue that it isn't and wasn't because in the MP games I participate in only few earth magic nations ended up with blood stones anyhow, so blood stones were almost solely used for their gem generation capabilities by the few nations that could make them, but that is almost certainly a result of the smaller scale of the games I play in)

[WraithLord]

Dimaz, I like your suggestion re. making house rules to deal with gem gens instead of removing them.

I think same can be made for SDRs and hammers, so for example all my future games will have a 20 pieces cap per nation rule.

So, If you, or someone else could volunteer to make a CBM 1.7 version w/o these changes (gem gens, hammers + SDR) it will indeed be the version I'd be using when hosting games. I think if CBM had a technical way to enforce this it would have, but for MP games (with house rules) we can trust the players to adhere to the rules.

makes sense?

[Dimaz]

Yesterday when I was going to sleep I was thinking about how to deal with gemgens (if I had the code access) in some more or less balanced and flavored way. So these ideas can be considered as produced by half-asleep mind, but still...
Clams - they are supposed to concentrate astral magic from environment and solidify it as pearls, so they can be connected with the amount of magic gained from other sources (showed in the graphs). Something like Nexus, but connected to one nation. So you can get maximum of your pearl income + 1/2 of other gems income divided by some coefficient (4?), and if you have more clams they have no environment magic to grow the pearls, so they will either stop working at all or give you pearl with 10% probability. So for example with income of 20 gems of each kind (140 total on the graphs), you'll have max 20 clams working - big number, but not insane. As I understand another problem with clams was that they lead to turtling for nations that can forge them efficiently - and when your clam income becomes connected with "real" income, it becomes less of a problem.
Bloodstones - they seem to be connected with "earth blood" and the earth that constantly bleeds becomes dead sooner or later. So concentrating large amounts of them can reduce resources and/or supplies for the nation. Like, every BS subtracts 5 resources from each province of the owner. This way the ability to build units and later even mages becomes reverse proportional to the number of stones, so sooner or later you'll have to stop producing them (this will also give more importance to production scale). The only exception that I see is LA Ermor but he has problems with blood slaves so probably it won't give him big advantage.
Fetishes - they can start spreading desease when there are many of them collected in one place. So for example if you have more than 5 fetishes in the province they start to act as bane venom charm. This will increase MM however so probably there are more elegant solutions.
WL, I will join such a game if I'll still play Dom3 at the time (currently I'm a bit tired of it so maybe I'll take a break after my games are ended).

[Calahan]

Don't forget that another problem with gem gens in general was it led to the bad playing mechanic of being able to conquer all of your opponents lands, but in doing so only managing to cut his gem income by a tiny percentage.

And this, combined with the huge defender advantage of having 1st combat action a player gets during fort storms (especially with several wish casters on hand for master enslave spam), led to many situations where actually capturing your opponents provinces didn't get you anywhere near defeating your opponent, regardless of how many provinces he had. And any sort of gem income advantage you had over your foe didn't matter much when storming, since you could have double your enemies gem income, but easily lose 10x the gem investment when trying to storm forts.

I am no lover of the changes CBM 1.7 has made, but gem gens in general were bad for large scale games, and so did have to go IMO (although I guess probably not much of a problem for small scale games. But I've never played small scale games so I wouldn't know). Even game rules, that for example, allow one clam per turn # would mean raid-immune gem income of 175 every other turn from wishing alone by turn 50. (and good players would easily be able to safeguard their gem gens from assassinations spells, remote damage attacks, Armageddon's etc. So relying on them to deprive your enemy of the gem gen income is not a real option in games involving proper players).

I know I will never play another game with gem gens again (although this is just my own personal preference of course)

[WraithLord]

Calahan, your points are true when gem gens are unlimited. Limiting them by house rules to 10-20 makes them just flavor and extra boost, nothing more. It's the same as with LaD, why castrate it in CBM if we can have a gentlemen agreement not to abuse it?

I'm not a modder myself but I like that solution. If enough players would like that we could have games set that way.

[Executor]

As someone who had over 400 clams in a single game, and pretty much concentrated every game on them until they were removed I have to say I agree with Calahan, one player could have much worse stats in the score graphs and still be the far superior nation.
However limiting them to say 20 max per game for example shouldn't have much of an impact. There are various magic site discounts that act in the same way, while they don't give you gems per say, you do sort of 'gain' gems when using them. A fine line is to be made here, I neither agree that gem gens should have been removed completely or let to stay, same applies to both hammers and SDR. Eliminating any one of them will just lead to new problems that will need balancing, eg. cost of items, thug usage, blood supremacy of certain nations...
So rather than eliminating them all completely a compromise should be made.
As for monitoring their usage, that is rather simple, once victory is achieved a player will submit random mid-late game turns as to confirm there was no cheating, and/or trowing away of items near the end.

[Zeldor]

Sure, but why deal with it? Removing gem gens, hammers etc makes nations more unique. And it's what we want. Tartarians should be removed too and national troops boosted. I really want to see nations being still same nations even in late game. Not some homogenous mass that specialises in S and D. And uses all E to make more and more hammers or gear for tartarians.

Of course this requires more solid changes in nation balance, as you will have to rely more on what you get, especially mages that won't be so easily boosted. CBM without same changes may be made if someone desires, but here we should just accept those changes and see how to make the game more balance with those changes included. So item/ritual prices/levels and national changes.

We all know QM does not like unthematic changes, so the room is really in:
- prices
- stats
- randoms [% chance]
- national summons [also: prices, stats, randoms]
- cost of forts/temples/labs
- pretenders [but really, are there any weak national ones still?]

[Zeldor]

Ok, here is a fast list of items and pricing.


Items that could be 1 path lower and so much cheaper:
The Summit
The Jade Mask
Amon Hotep
Wraith Crown
Robe of Invulnerability
Bone Armor
Stymphalan Wings
Wall Shaker
Stone Idol [make it S1E2?]

Items that could use stat boosts:
Wand of Wild Fire
Summer Sword [?]
Rod of the Phoenix
Shadow Brand
The Tartarian Chains
Woundflame
Ice Pebble Staff
Staff of Elemental Mastery [someone would have to be desperate to get it as booster]
Wraith Sword
Standard of the Damned
Tempest [?]
Sun Slayer should autocast Darkness
Lucky Coin, Shield of the Accursed, Lantern Shield were already rarely used, now they are even less useful
Flame Helmet [remove exhaustion?]
Spirit Helmet - nice item, but at 15A rather too expensive, you can get Shishi for that...
Jade Armor - situational and expensive now
Aseftik's and Monolith - quite often nor forged at all even now, but at 15E they may be too cheap, so some boost maybe?

Not sure about other x4 items - no hammer means they are all 8 gems more expensive... and some of them were overpriced at 17 too.

BTW, maybe you should remove Sickle too?

[Peter Ebbesen]

Staff of Elemental Mastery [someone would have to be desperate to get it as booster]

Well, they do give that extra boost if you need it for a ritual spell and the two different versions do have some nice side effects when used in combat, though admittedly one is usually better off using a 1H of choice plus a shield or going dual shields.

For forging, they have until now been mostly useless except for the 4-armed pretenders, but if dwarven hammers are going the way of the dodo wielding a 2H while forging is no longer going to be major drawback.

They are damn expensive and I certainly don't relish the thought of forging one without a dwarven hammer but if you can forge them they are still a better investment than empowering for many mages.


BTW, maybe you should remove Sickle too?
Burn your eyes. Must everything with a strong unique effect be killed off to satisfy your cravings for mediocrity? :D

[Valerius]

If you'd like to add gem gens back into the game I'd suggest using gem generating summons rather than magic items, since monster modding is much more robust than item modding. Some of the advantages:

Differentiation & Limitation: one of the problems with clams is that anyone could (and did) make them so they didn't just benefit the nations that needed them and that they were forged in quantities only limited by the game engine. If you go to a summons based system using unique national summons you could say, for example, that Jotunheim gets 1 unique gem generating summon, while Bandar Log gets 4. Or you could vary the income per summon so that nations that needed gem gens got more out of their summons. You could also generate gems other than S/E/F in order to better match the character of a nation.

You could also vary the cost/research level of obtaining gem gens. A weak nation might be able to obtain their first gem gen summon at a low research level/cost while a more powerful nation will not be able to obtain any gem generating summons until much later/at a higher cost.

Tartarians should be removed too and national troops boosted. I really want to see nations being still same nations even in late game. Not some homogenous mass that specialises in S and D. And uses all E to make more and more hammers or gear for tartarians.

I agree completely! And I think using summons to generate gems and even troops could help do this in a way magic items can't. As an example, what about a game setting that doubles your starting cap gem income, has a magic site frequency of around 20% and has gem generating national summons? Your gem income would be heavily skewed towards the paths of your national mages but you'd have some diversity in case you really needed a certain summon/magic item (and trade becomes more interesting since you won't necessarily have the gem income to forge some items or summon some units). As the game went on your gem income would increase but it would be in paths your nation specializes in. Of course you need viable troop and especially thug/SC options to spend these gems on. I think CBM does a good job making the various troop summons appealing and the EDM now provides thug/SC options in paths that didn't have them before (of course the ideal is national summons but not every nation has a good set of those). It's not perfect but I think it can be balanced. For example, one of the really tough things about death/blood nations is that they aren't impaired by darkness. You could remove Darkness as a researchable spell and allow D/B nations one or more unique summons that would autocast the spell. So it would be a tool but not one they could use on a large scale.

Reduce micro: instead of a clam generating 1 pearl and having dozens of clams you could have a summon generate several gems, making management of this resource easy.

Presence on the map: A frustrating thing about gem gens is that you can breach the walls of a castle that you know has clam holders and they'll just be transferred to another location. If the gem generator is an actual unit though it won't necessarily be able to escape. You can make these units of varying strength; perhaps some will be quite resistant to damage while others are vulnerable to even low level remote attack spells. Perhaps some are mobile while others are not. I think you can make the unit immune to being enslaved/charmed/etc so that while an opponent could eliminate your gem generating units they couldn't gain them for themselves (have to test this though). You could make them immobile, no leadership, negative magicboost - basically try to make it so all they can do is stay in one place and generate gems. It's not perfect (for instance you could prophetize them) but I think you could have house rules not to do that kind of thing.

Options: with the range of monster modding commands available you could do all sorts of interesting things. Maybe a summon that generates a large amount of gems for a few turns and then generates only a few gems but also dom summons allies? Or a D gem generating summon that also causes unrest and population loss?


Now the one problem here is that you can only add so many summons to the game. The next patch will help with this immensely. Until then, I still think you could implement something like this (I'd have to check to see how many free slots are available with CBM 1.6 or 1.7) though perhaps you'd have issues if you combined this with mod nations.

[Colonial]

I am a new player, and I must say. I am going to host my first few games with CBM 1.41 +EDM.

I don't much care for these radical shifts in magic items 1.6 and 1.7 have brought out. Although I guess I can understand that if you have been playing for a while change is refreshing.

Ideally I would like to see the CBM branch, with one copy staying as it is and one holding closer to the origional with these 6 items re-added, as well as possibly other changes.

Must everything with a strong unique effect be killed off to satisfy your cravings for mediocrity?

It seems to me that that is exactly what has happened. Its too bad.

[Zeldor]

I have played this game long enough to dislike anything that spoils the fun - the fun of playing different games. I just hate the late-game effect when every nation is the same. You seek earth gems to make more hammers to put more gear on tartarians. They make every game repetitive. And they give you nothing in exchange. Gemgens are about pure hoarding and being the best horder. If anyone wants that, then probably Dom is not the right game for him. Hammers and SDRs are about hording too - you just forge so you don't waste hammer time. SDRs make you want to forge it for every mage. They make you forge SDRs before making anything else with blood slaves.

So really, if you want to use that stuff and you don't mind late game being exactly the same for every nation, then spend few minutes with text editor and undo all changes that annoy you. It's very simple. But please, do not try to tell me gemgens are cool.

[TheConway]

I see a lot of talk about making "houserules" about gemgens. I gotta say that I do not see how those can possibly succeed. I suspect that finding someone willing to take the time to check the turn files is going to be very difficult, and i wouldn't be surprised if people who didn't believe they had a real shot at winning just decided "**** it, they won't check me anyways since I won't win" and ignore the rules. Unlike sickle farming, LAD abuse, or bogus orders, gem gen limits cannot be realistically checked in-game. Therefore I think such "house rules" are doomed.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Let me get this right, Zeldor: If people say that something that the game shipped with, but which you seriously dislike and consider a bad gameplay mechanic (such as gem generators, hammers, and SDR), is cool and wants to play with it then a) The game is probably not right for them, and b) They should not tell you that they consider it cool, because you know better.

I'll admit to being pretty arrogant myself, but I doubt I'd ever have the gall to tell other people as you are doing: "If you like the game mechanics the game shipped with, the game is probably not the right game for you". This may not have been what you intended to say, but it is what you ended up saying. :D

[TheConway]

Perhaps Zeldor's point would have been better phrased as "then CBM is not for you."

[Finalgenesis]

Weightless Scale Mail : A2 -> A1

You do realize this would obsolete Lightweight Scale Mail? Not that that's necessarily bad...

Sounds good, toss out lightweight and make weightless cheaper.

[
Moon blade : 2 handed -> 1 handed; S1 -> S2 or lower stats? (I mean, even sandhyabala has 1-handed moon blades...)

Moving to 1-hand would definitely open up to potential situational use...
I'd say my suggestion falls short by a lot, for reference I always compare to the value weapons, in this case I'll pull out Kryss since it's same const level:
+ 2x attack
+ AP attack
+ Death poison
+ PR
- Const 6
- Cost 10 N

Moonblade:
+ 2x vs magic (I'd take just AP over this, less powerful, works on everything. same with 2x attack if less power vs magic but more versatility)
o Cost 5 S
- 2 hander
- Const 6

Really, I would make moonblade 1 hand AND give it either a) +MR b) slay magic or c) x3 vs magic creature, all of which are thematic and gives it an actual purpose. Up price to 10S with the above modification, and it would be a weapon that might actually be considered.


Do people make rings of the warrior? RE: the axe - how would it then compare vs. the heart finder?


I know I forge rings and axe often when I have blood access (they do well together even) as they cost practically nothing and are very usable for super economic thugs and general thug deterrent. Axe gives unresistable chest wound! where heart finder gives MR kill, both have their uses (SC deterrent vs animal/low MR slayer). I know from experience how daunting it is in terms of using thugs/SCs to find enemy flesheaters + warrior rings liberally sprinkled all over the place (for a pittance).


I think that 1H bane blade + shield is pretty much always better than the 2hand version, which leaves its utility down to units you were going to give a magic weapon to that don't already have shields and you don't want to invest another 5 gems into...


Right, about the only time you might forge 2H is if you don't plan on a shield, but then you'd still go for 1H because of the option and versatility of adding shield. Considering the situation you would use baneblade for (not heavy duty anti-thug/SC surely), the damage boost from 2H doesn't seem that good most of the time to justify giving up shield possibility, maybe if you keep 2H bane in const 0 and 1H bane in Const 2 or 4, or a large boost to 2H bane like AP or 1 AoE horror +0 effect.

All of these seem reasonable, in light of hammer removal. However, consider the impact of forging the hammer of the forge lord or hammer (potentially + forge lord pretender and/or early FoTA from Ulm) to churn out the above items.

Indeed, but that is true for all items, FoTA is nuts before, it's still gonna be nuts either way. hammer forge lord, forge lord and hammer are all going to skew things before and maybe a little more with the changes, they are powerful for sure but each with their price (rushing const, taking forge lord and burning pts on him, declaring war on the world), and all things considered, I don't think that's a bad thing in general until proven beyond a doubt that it's broken as hell and most games are won relying on them.

At that price, people might be include to do it just to get the corpse candles at the edge of the field.

Agree, it just might, and I'd be happy to see it instead of the usual vine, eye, gleaming gold and charcoal. changes to other never-seen shields might be in order too, so they can actually compete for player consideration.


Where I'm on the fence for in varying degrees, and where 1 lvl price drop seem excessive:

Amulet of Missile Protection

Note that at 2A it's the same price as the air-based shields.

a 5 gem cut seems excessive I admit, but then most things that can use missile prot amulet would rather tend to use various shields. I will agree there are rare cases where for slot consideration you may use this instead, but really, for 10 gems, you can get a very solid shield that both block most arrow and do a hell of a lot more. So... I'm on the fence for this one, maybe a mini boost? (50% LR? tiny def boost?)

[
Rod of the Phoenix - Already used in games, but with hammer changes I think I may never see them again (almost the price of a Zmey?), even as a specific counter. FR and a leadership boost maybe?

Stymphalian Wings

Axe of Hate -(The fatigue damage is not AoE it seems, has to hit) - and honestly, I see kryss used as SC slayer over axe of hate 100% of the time.

Sword of Swiftness


For the Sword of Swiftness, perhaps adding +1 or more attacks would be a better re-balance vs. a price drop?

Agree, 3 attacks would give swiftness actual use as anti-high def, or otherwise give it something or lower price, again compare it to Kryss:
same # of attack, no AP, no death poison, no PR, same gem cost (though using W rather then N), the only advantage is Const 4...

Same with axe of hate, you get a fatigue damage on hit which has its use, but would you trade it for kryss' list of utility for the same price? Though it does comes much earlier at Const 2, so I could actually see it stay as it is now when you need to kill something BIG before const 6 rolls around.

Edit: Zeldor's list looks pretty reasonable too, though I have little experience with artifacts (never gotten Const 8 early enough).

[Finalgenesis]

Nation balancing: LA ryleh

Some more suggestions for discussion:

LA Ryleh has sustainability problems, in any reasonable sized game they hit a point rather soon where they can no longer recruit mages or priest as your population dwindle to nothing, which you need to wring any use out of the chaff. On paper the various ways to help with their income is:

1) Luck - a) inconsistent. b) luck income is hit by your maintenance cost before you can spend them, making most of the smaller luck income event meaningless.

2) Fire gem - Even with alchemy stone if you manage to forge it, thats 13F per mage, 19F without. If you can make this feastible in a clamless game, I salute you.

3) Summon mage - your V spectre cost 25S, has only 4S path with none of the utility you can get out of mage. Their cost reflect their purpose: to make things go insane rather then replace your mages as buffer, battle mage, researchers ...etc. Honestly, it's almost the cost of a golem, or an elemental royalty if you consider wish conversion rate.

Finally, their freespawn chaff have a gold cost of 1, meaning every 15 of them have a 1 gold upkeep. Why do they take upkeep? Maenads don't require upkeep, why are my junkies and crazies asking for gold?

Some suggestions:

1. No upkeep for chaff, hell if it was moddable I'd suggest -2 gold cost for that matter to generate gold and require decision on using them or saving them for gold income.

2. national mage/priest summonable, though I can see various problems and abuse for this. Perhaps a spell to change 10S into 500 gold? So you can actually switch to a gem economy (as LA ryleh certain don't have the choice of gold economy). Your "spell" income would still get hit by maintenance so you want to do multiple casting in one go, the upper limit imposed by gold economy is still there since your spell income gets hit by maintenance before you get a chance to spent it. You'd still be disadvantaged since others get gold + gem economy (or blood+gem), while you can only run on gem economy with "free" chaff to "compensate".

3. Dom summoned cultist can have higher/random paths, currently they can possibly get 1S and abit crazy to boot. I can frankly imagine hedge wizards and witches getting the dreams and turning to your cult, god knows my summoned casters and mermage slaves go bonkers fast enough. With high insanity on them it is already a heavy enough penalty and make marching armies in formation diffioooOOOO shinyyyy!

4. LA National summon spell to call a small batch of random void monsters, more for flavor then anything else. The power of the void grows and the star spawns can now open the gate anywhere given preparation (lab).

LA ryleh strikes me as dripping with theme and oppurtunity to enhance their gameplay (not more powerful, but more different / weird / thought out). The void takes a small role in MA, and supposedly in LA the void has become much more significant, Spawns receive great dream powers (dream of ryleh), their void spectres can be called back and the voice influence sleepers around the world. I could easily see global spell (In the vein of soul gate for LA Ermor and carrion woods for Pan) for ryleh and greater access to void creatures, and other unusual mechanic to make goldless Ryleh work.

[chrispedersen]

Some improvements to Rlyeh are pretty easily moddable.
I'd suggest the following and then reanalyse:

1. replace water only free spawns with with amphibious. Mid+ you have no need for these troops, adn they become cost drain and micromanagement hell.

2. The immovable free spawns should be modded to other cthulu inspired units.

Personally my cbm mod replaced some of them with map move 1 dom spreading units.

[Fantomen]

1. replace water only free spawns with with amphibious. Mid+ you have no need for these troops, adn they become cost drain and micromanagement hell.
Agreed. I also think all freespawns should be 0 upkeep.

2. The immovable free spawns should be modded to other cthulu inspired units.
Personally my cbm mod replaced some of them with map move 1 dom spreading units.
IMO, a rare freespawn that is immobile and dom spreading would be cool. With movement I think it might be to powerful.

On top of that I'd suggest adding a silver mine or something to the capital, so you keep a trickle of gold after population is dead.

[Calahan]

I think same can be made for SDRs and hammers, so for example all my future games will have a 20 pieces cap per nation rule.

If I understand correctly, and based on what I know with how the Artefacts game was setup. Limiting nations to a specific number of items can be modded (rather than use house rules) by giving each nation X starting commanders (who are immobile and die on turn 2) each equipped with whatever item you are limiting. With X being the number you want. And making the item unique (or Const 12) so they can't be re-forged.

My limited modding knowledge means I'm not sure if this has to be modded via map commands though, which might prevent it being an actual mod. (although nations starting commanders can be changed using a mod, so maybe commanders can be added as well, unless there is a hard limit of two)

[WraithLord]

Sounds great :)
Any idea where to start looking for how to get it done?

And come to think of it, 20 is too much, even for a large game. 5 makes more sense if the idea is to keep it for flavor only. It will also allow nations not to go out of their way in order to get those hammers. The only difference from 1 is that it's less drastic so instead of turn off the lights they are just dimmed.

[Redeyes]

What's people's opinion on the different pretender prices?

... I'm thinking of the classic pretenders like Moloch, Prince of Death, liches, and Cyclops that I think aren't seen often enough now, as well as some high priced nationals like the Risen Oracle.

[Dimaz]

IMO the whole point of hammers and SDRs is investment, so the idea of adding them at the start sounds really strange to me. In fact, I certainly prefer removing them completely than adding them at the start, as it will only make you scratch your head trying to utilize them most so rushing const will be even more top-priority than with vanilla hammers. Again, as i said, in fact I see no problem with vanilla DH at all, other than few individuals trying to promote their playstyle for everyone else. SDRs are a bit too cheap for what they do OTOH.

[Aethyr]

If you'd like to add gem gens back into the game I'd suggest using gem generating summons rather than magic items, since monster modding is much more robust than item modding. Some of the advantages:

Differentiation & Limitation: one of the problems with clams is that anyone could (and did) make them so they didn't just benefit the nations that needed them and that they were forged in quantities only limited by the game engine. If you go to a summons based system using unique national summons you could say, for example, that Jotunheim gets 1 unique gem generating summon, while Bandar Log gets 4. Or you could vary the income per summon so that nations that needed gem gens got more out of their summons. You could also generate gems other than S/E/F in order to better match the character of a nation.

You could also vary the cost/research level of obtaining gem gens. A weak nation might be able to obtain their first gem gen summon at a low research level/cost while a more powerful nation will not be able to obtain any gem generating summons until much later/at a higher cost.


Valerius, this is a really cool idea.

[Calahan]

If you'd like to add gem gens back into the game I'd suggest using gem generating summons rather than magic items, since monster modding is much more robust than item modding. Some of the advantages:

Differentiation & Limitation: one of the problems with clams is that anyone could (and did) make them so they didn't just benefit the nations that needed them and that they were forged in quantities only limited by the game engine. If you go to a summons based system using unique national summons you could say, for example, that Jotunheim gets 1 unique gem generating summon, while Bandar Log gets 4. Or you could vary the income per summon so that nations that needed gem gens got more out of their summons. You could also generate gems other than S/E/F in order to better match the character of a nation.

You could also vary the cost/research level of obtaining gem gens. A weak nation might be able to obtain their first gem gen summon at a low research level/cost while a more powerful nation will not be able to obtain any gem generating summons until much later/at a higher cost.

Gem generating summons sound an interesting idea in the 'investment strategy' area of the game. But I think the only way they'd work is if each nation was given X national uniques as a way of limiting them. As I doubt house rules (the same as house rules for items) to limit their numbers would work due to genuine player counting errors, and intentional rule bending (plus all the other reasons TheConway pointed out).

And right now 10+ unique summons for each nation will likely overshoot the mod spell limits by quite a way (until the next patch comes out at least).

---------------------------------

Sounds great :)
Any idea where to start looking for how to get it done?

No idea sorry. I'm waiting until all my current games are finished before venturing into modding. (as I do have a few mod plans if I can find the time and patience)

----------------------------------

IMO the whole point of hammers and SDRs is investment, so the idea of adding them at the start sounds really strange to me. In fact, I certainly prefer removing them completely than adding them at the start, as it will only make you scratch your head trying to utilize them most so rushing const will be even more top-priority than with vanilla hammers. Again, as i said, in fact I see no problem with vanilla DH at all, other than few individuals trying to promote their playstyle for everyone else. SDRs are a bit too cheap for what they do OTOH.
X number of Hammers from turn 1 might not fit that well into the 'investment strategy' area of the game, but it would still allow players to choose which gem type to use for maximum forging efficiency, and which type to allow some wastage with. Unique hammers removes that area of the game entirely (along with several others), so at least limited hammers would still allow some skill to remain.

Although the 'everyone rushes Construction' problem might be an unwanted drawback, but personally I think I'd still prefer limited hammers to no hammers. But I also think there is nothing at all wrong with Hammers to begin with, and I wasn't even aware anyone considered them a problem until this CBM version was released.


Right now I'm also firmly in the 'leave hammers alone' camp, at least until someone provides some truly creditable evidence to why they are bad. As the reasons I've heard so far for nerfing hammers is far from credible IMO, and seem more based on some players just not liking them, and/or not liking the extra thought required during design and play with regards acquiring them. In theory, I'm all for modding-out broken aspects of the game (such as unlimited gem gens), but not for modding-out things purely on the basis that someone doesn't like them. But I do accept of course that the owner of a mod is free to do whatever he or she likes. The same way everyone is free to use whatever mods he or she likes for in their games. So if you don't like the changes a recent version of your favourite mod(s) has made, then don't use it basically.

[WraithLord]

IMO the whole point of hammers and SDRs is investment, so the idea of adding them at the start sounds really strange to me. In fact, I certainly prefer removing them completely than adding them at the start, as it will only make you scratch your head trying to utilize them most so rushing const will be even more top-priority than with vanilla hammers. Again, as i said, in fact I see no problem with vanilla DH at all, other than few individuals trying to promote their playstyle for everyone else. SDRs are a bit too cheap for what they do OTOH.
Dimaz, I just caught myself after posting with the exact same thought. However, if I were to choose between infinite hammers and no hammers I'm no leaning towards no hammers.
Imagine for a 2nd that there were items giving conjuration/enchant bonus. Then what, everyone would be forced to forge them. So if everyone forges them then it's the same as if no one forges them but with less MM.
Nations that suffer greatly from no hammers need to be addressed by CBM.
I think I have come a full circle and now am more open to accept the unique hammer change.

[Aethyr]

Gem generating summons sound an interesting idea in the 'investment strategy' area of the game. But I think the only way they'd work is if each nation was given X national uniques as a way of limiting them. As I doubt house rules (the same as house rules for items) to limit their numbers would work due to genuine player counting errors, and intential rule bending (plus all the other reasons TheConway pointed out).

And right now 10+ unique summons for each nation will likely overshoot the mod spell limits by quite a way (until the next patch comes out at least).


This makes sense. I'm not a modder, so this may be a bad question, but would there be a way to limit the actual number of these "uniques" that could be "in play" at any one time for each nation?

[Calahan]

Gem generating summons sound an interesting idea in the 'investment strategy' area of the game. But I think the only way they'd work is if each nation was given X national uniques as a way of limiting them. As I doubt house rules (the same as house rules for items) to limit their numbers would work due to genuine player counting errors, and intential rule bending (plus all the other reasons TheConway pointed out).

And right now 10+ unique summons for each nation will likely overshoot the mod spell limits by quite a way (until the next patch comes out at least).


This makes sense. I'm not a modder, so this may be a bad question, but would there be a way to limit the actual number of these "uniques" that could be "in play" at any one time for each nation?
As far as I know, and I may well be wrong since my knowledge is limited, modding unique spells is limited to pinching and overwriting the unqiue spells from an already existing unique summom spell, as you can not 'create' a new unique summon spell.

I believe a lot of modders have used the Ashdod spells (for example) for their mod nations, since that nation is never allowed in most games anyway, so it's spell slot won't be getting used. But the Ashdod set of spells can only be used by one nation per game, (again I might be wrong with my knowledge of modding limits), which means it's currently not really possible to mod each nation to have a unqiue set of summon spells (unless it was a very small game, and all the other unique summons in the game were pinched and overwritten in order to get enough unique summon spells for everyone)

[llamabeast]

It's possible to add new spells that summon a particular unique unit. It's not possible to add new spells that summon one of a set (e.g. a version of Tartarian Gate, or the Ashdod unique summons). If you want one of a set then you have to overwrite another set like Calahan says.

[Stavis_L]

..giving each nation X starting commanders (who are immobile and die on turn 2) each equipped with whatever item you are limiting. With X being the number you want. And making the item unique (or Const 12) so they can't be re-forged.

My limited modding knowledge means I'm not sure if this has to be modded via map commands though, which might prevent it being an actual mod. (although nations starting commanders can be changed using a mod, so maybe commanders can be added as well, unless there is a hard limit of two)

1) Yes, this would need to be done via map commands vs. mod commands, because
2) Yes, you are hard limited to 2 commanders at the start (i.e. the starting commander + the starting scout.)

(I realize the discussion progressed past this point, but in case anyone was interested.)

[Stavis_L]

It's possible to add new spells that summon a particular unique unit. It's not possible to add new spells that summon one of a set (e.g. a version of Tartarian Gate, or the Ashdod unique summons). If you want one of a set then you have to overwrite another set like Calahan says.

For reference, I believe the options for multi-unique summon spells are:

1) The various elemental royalty summons
2) The demon princes (ice, fire, heliophagi, demon lords)
3) The treelords
4) The Lords of Civilization/Grigori (Hinnom)
5) The Spentas (Caelum)
6) The Tlaloques (Mictlan)

[Calahan]

It's possible to add new spells that summon a particular unique unit. It's not possible to add new spells that summon one of a set (e.g. a version of Tartarian Gate, or the Ashdod unique summons). If you want one of a set then you have to overwrite another set like Calahan says.
Many thanks for clearing that up llama. So it would be possible (spell limits allowing) to give each nation 8 (for example) seperate unique summon spells (that generate gems for the purpose of this debate). Interesting idea. I have no idea yet on the merits of this, but as an idea it's good to know it is an actual option.

--------------------


..giving each nation X starting commanders (who are immobile and die on turn 2) each equipped with whatever item you are limiting. With X being the number you want. And making the item unique (or Const 12) so they can't be re-forged.

My limited modding knowledge means I'm not sure if this has to be modded via map commands though, which might prevent it being an actual mod. (although nations starting commanders can be changed using a mod, so maybe commanders can be added as well, unless there is a hard limit of two)

1) Yes, this would need to be done via map commands vs. mod commands, because
2) Yes, you are hard limited to 2 commanders at the start (i.e. the starting commander + the starting scout.)

(I realize the discussion progressed past this point, but in case anyone was interested.)
Thanks Stavis. I suspected nations were hard coded to 2 commanders :(

[Redeyes]

It's possible to add new spells that summon a particular unique unit. It's not possible to add new spells that summon one of a set (e.g. a version of Tartarian Gate, or the Ashdod unique summons). If you want one of a set then you have to overwrite another set like Calahan says.

For reference, I believe the options for multi-unique summon spells are:

1) The various elemental royalty summons
2) The demon princes (ice, fire, heliophagi, demon lords)
3) The treelords
4) The Lords of Civilization/Grigori (Hinnom)
5) The Spentas (Caelum)
6) The Tlaloques (Mictlan)
There's also the Jinn, Percival the Pocket Knight, Carcator and Holger the Head, but those are all from items, are singular summons (like Illheart and Banefire), and all but the Jinn are combat summons. Some of the combat summons might be unique because they come from artifacts, I don't really know; do they accrue experience?

Blood slaves are used if they are close to the caster, aren't they? If the combat summons can be used to introduce extra blood slaves they could be interesting as a means to ensure a constant supply of blood slaves in combat.

[NooBliss]

IMO the whole point of hammers and SDRs is investment, so the idea of adding them at the start sounds really strange to me. In fact, I certainly prefer removing them completely than adding them at the start, as it will only make you scratch your head trying to utilize them most so rushing const will be even more top-priority than with vanilla hammers. Again, as i said, in fact I see no problem with vanilla DH at all, other than few individuals trying to promote their playstyle for everyone else. SDRs are a bit too cheap for what they do OTOH.
Dimaz, I just caught myself after posting with the exact same thought. However, if I were to choose between infinite hammers and no hammers I'm no leaning towards no hammers.
Imagine for a 2nd that there were items giving conjuration/enchant bonus. Then what, everyone would be forced to forge them. So if everyone forges them then it's the same as if no one forges them but with less MM.
Nations that suffer greatly from no hammers need to be addressed by CBM.
I think I have come a full circle and now am more open to accept the unique hammer change.

It's not that easy in my opinion. Infinite hammers mean that you can invest some time and thought to improve your forging and get more magic items. No hammers means that you get no such opportunity, thus you have less items.
Thus, nations with blood and/or stronger troops (usually countered by equipping thugs) get stronger while nations such as Eriu get even weaker.

P.S.
Make LA Rlyeh freespawn truly free? Why not make LA Ermor freespawn generate gold as well? :)

[Squirrelloid]

Regarding Ulm:
I think the 'boosts' Ulm got almost entirely miss the point.

Ok, the armor rebalancing is probably a good thing. Although Ulm's infantry still has a serious problem - their base stats are straight 10s. For a professional military, I'd expect *some* infantry soldiers with better than basic stats. EA Ulm has them, why doesn't MA Ulm? I'm not convinced the armor rebalancing does enough for Ulm's troops, since they were actively bad before, and now they might just not lose to tall grass, but i still have to couch that cautiously. Don't be fooled into thinking the armor changes make Ulm's infantry actually good.

Iron Angels should not be Ulm's focus, its troops should be. And with thugs nerfed pretty hard by the loss of hammers, i'm not convinced making them easier to acquire helps them all that much. But then, its been so long since i've actually seen one, I can't remember what they do.

Finally, FotA available at level 0 is laughable. On the one hand, there's little worth forging without construction research anyway. Otoh, casting FotA take a lot of E gems - gems they can't afford to spend very early anyway (or even if they do, then what gems are they going to forge with?). And since I expect Ulm will roll over and die pretty easily even with the armor buff, its just another reason to kill them early. (Not that a second capital is ever a bad reason to kill someone).

Regarding SDRs:
SDRs are a gem gen. They needed to go. The heims probably need to be looked at following their removal to help their chronic blood hunting problem, but no one else should be overly affected in an adverse manner. All the other real blood powers either have cheap(ish) B1 hunters, or B2+ hunters readily available.

Regarding Hammers:
I think this is a change that hasn't been thought through very carefully, and many nations need adjustments, potentially dramatic adjustments, to account for the change. Eriu went from bad to unplayable. TNN and the heims are also in pretty bad shape. The real winners? Nations like Mictlan who didn't really have a good way to get hammers before (because they took a non-E bless chassis and had no E national mages). Mictlan, of course, had no need of a buff, stealth or otherwise. (And no, loss of SDRs doesn't really harm Mictlan very much).

[Soyweiser]

All the other real blood powers either have cheap(ish) B1 hunters, or B2+ hunters readily available.

Without SDR's a B1 blood hunter only has a (unconfirmed) 50% chance of successfully hunting slaves. Way to low chance.

With a SDR this raises to 90%. (Yeah, the percentages are influenced by the game settings).

Removal of the SDR just makes it very hard to blood hunt with B1 hunters. So these b1 mages are now useless.

[Executor]

All the other real blood powers either have cheap(ish) B1 hunters, or B2+ hunters readily available.

Without SDR's a B1 blood hunter only has a (unconfirmed) 50% chance of successfully hunting slaves. Way to low chance.

With a SDR this raises to 90%. (Yeah, the percentages are influenced by the game settings).

Removal of the SDR just makes it very hard to blood hunt with B1 hunters. So these b1 mages are now useless.

Exactly what I stated a few days back, it will just make certain blood nations much more powerful eg. Jotun, Marg... while nations like Van get royally screwed.

[Redeyes]

Regarding SDRs:
SDRs are a gem gen. They needed to go. The heims probably need to be looked at following their removal to help their chronic blood hunting problem, but no one else should be overly affected in an adverse manner. All the other real blood powers either have cheap(ish) B1 hunters, or B2+ hunters readily available.
Well, if you want to give the Heims (or anyone else) more blood slaves, would it work to give their commanders a retinue of blood slaves (unit 326) to help them in combat?

[Valerius]

Squirrelloid's balance mod also removed SDRs and Jack_Trowell suggested giving Vanjarls/Vanadrotts a dousing bonus. I think this is an excellent solution. They get the bonus without having to spend 3 blood slaves (or 5 without a hammer) and a mage turn to forge an SDR but the restricting factor with Van's blood hunting is that you have to pay 280 gold for the mage so I don't think giving them a dousing bonus really changes game balance.

[Soyweiser]

Exactly what I stated a few days back, it will just make certain blood nations much more powerful eg. Jotun, Marg... while nations like Van get royally screwed.

The small jotun mages do get screwed, and a few of these with SDR's are way more economical than a Skratti.

[rdonj]

Is there any particular reason that the heims couldn't just be given a dousing bonus to make up for the lack of blood magic? It seems a simple enough fix without introducing complicated and weird new mechanics.

[Soyweiser]

I agree with Valerius. But I also think the dousing bonus really needs an icon.

[Valerius]

It's possible to add new spells that summon a particular unique unit. It's not possible to add new spells that summon one of a set (e.g. a version of Tartarian Gate, or the Ashdod unique summons). If you want one of a set then you have to overwrite another set like Calahan says.
Many thanks for clearing that up llama. So it would be possible (spell limits allowing) to give each nation 8 (for example) seperate unique summon spells (that generate gems for the purpose of this debate). Interesting idea. I have no idea yet on the merits of this, but as an idea it's good to know it is an actual option.

Yes, this is exactly what I had in mind: make the gem generating summons unique so you can limit them in a way you can't with item modding (where it's either unique or unlimited).

Btw, while you could certainly replicate the way everyone can get equal access to clams, I had in mind that this would be a game balance mechanism. So, for example, Bandar might have eight gem generating summons while Jotun only had one or two (or none). And aside from the number of summons their value could also be different. Want to give Bandar a mid-game boost? Give them a unit that only costs 5 gems to summon and generates 5S gems a turn (or N or W or whatever you think would be useful). Unlike with magic items, or for that matter non-unique summons, you don't have to worry that this discounted cost will be abused.

It's also worth mentioning that the value of these summons in the end game will vary depending on the size of the game. The larger the game, the smaller a percentage of your total gem income these gem generating summons will provide.

I wouldn't really say I'm pushing for this, just that if you like the idea of gem gems this would be an approach with a lot more options than item modding provides since you could limit the scale of it and apply it where needed.

[P3D]

FWIW, there's an alternative to the now unique dousing rod, even if a bit more expensive. Empower B1 for 30 slaves - instead of 6 or 10. It would take about 10 turns to pay for itself.

[earcaraxe]

SDRs give +40% chance, +1 level of B gives +20%

[llamabeast]

That's not true earcaraxe, they exactly the same effect.

That's a good point about the empowering, might well be worth it sometimes.

[earcaraxe]

are u sure llama?

i have found this: http://www.freewebs.com/sunraybe/faq.html
(it may be outdated, but if it is, then what is the real formulae?)

i made some testing with bloodhunting abysian warlocks.

form: for instance "23db 11db B5 sdr =100" means 11 warlocks with sdr averages 100 slaves on 23 tries.

20db 2db B4 sdr =16,35

20db 2db B4 =15,1

20db 2db B3 sdr =17,05

10db 2db B2 sdr =13,6

10db 2db B2 =10,5

10db 2db B3 =13,8

[Quitti]

Vanheim (EA+MA) have expensive (though sacred) and crappy mages. B1 easily achievable at high price. It doesn't seem that they were meant to be a heavy blood nation, more like dabble in it for additional benefit - but the problem probably is that air itself is quite crappy, and the van troops are not actually top tier cost/effectiveness wise while not bad per se. They'd benefit from heavy investment in blood, which would require the aforementioned dousing bonus added to vanjarls/vanadrotts, or another way to boost them might be to add a cheap-ish nonsacred human mage (n1e1 witches, n1+0.1 forest wizards or w/e) to help them with research and diversity.

Also I agree with Squirreloid about MA Ulm @ cbm 1.7. Who wouldn't want easy +5e from early-midgame for themselves? It's not like Ulm can defend themselves in the late game either though with their national troops and mages. Black priests drain immune + recruit everywhere might help the problem (iron darts/blizzard casters), as would boosting up the master smith random to 25% or even 50%.

edit: and also boosting the stats of the normal troops. Make them base enc1 or 2, add in 1-2 attack for all of them. They're supposed to be THE human troops of the game who don't tire from combat and are exceptionally good at it. Armor revamp was a good step forward, but it (almost) equally boosts all other heavy armor nations in the game.

[NooBliss]

Give Ulm some time. Their troops are not really bad - Ulm has got these knights for early expansion, and their troops are cheap and tough, so with several castles to recruit from you can actually build good military.
In Kings of Drama Ulm seems to do just fine at the moment.

[Squirrelloid]

All the other real blood powers either have cheap(ish) B1 hunters, or B2+ hunters readily available.

Without SDR's a B1 blood hunter only has a (unconfirmed) 50% chance of successfully hunting slaves. Way to low chance.

With a SDR this raises to 90%. (Yeah, the percentages are influenced by the game settings).

Removal of the SDR just makes it very hard to blood hunt with B1 hunters. So these b1 mages are now useless.

and so you hire more bloodhunters without SDRs... I'm sure Mictlan is going to cry about it with its 60g sacred B1 mages... Seriously, this is not a tragedy.

[Quitti]

In Kings of Drama Ulm seems to do just fine at the moment.

Did you consider that they had the elephant corps from turn 1 for themselves. Did you also consider that it's an expert playing the nation instead of a mediocre player? Did you also consider that while we don't know what's going on in there, he might've had easy start. One game does not make statistics. Especially the first 4 turns of one.

[NooBliss]

That's exactly why I am saying 'give Ulm some time before declaring it too weak'. :)

[Calahan]

That's exactly why I am saying 'give Ulm some time before declaring it too weak'. :)
Well they've had 4 years so far, how much more time do you reckon they need?

[NooBliss]

4 years since CBM 1.7? ^^

[Calahan]

4 years since CBM 1.7? ^^
Ah, apologies NooBliss, I thought you were arguing against the changes that CBM 1.7 made to Ulm. (since you were talking about them having decent troops etc, which they still haven't really got even with the 1.7 changes. Still no MR and a troop roster mostly full of 10's on base stats).

The hammer nerf hurts them the most though, as what hasn't been considered yet (or I haven't seen it) is how much the hammer nerf destroys some nation's diplomacy powers. As the likes of MA Ulm and EA Agartha can often survive the early game by grabbing some NAP's, along with the added "I'll give you a few free hammers if you sign a NAP" sweetener. I used this very successfully in the Legends of Faerun game (around 18 monts ago) to survive as EA Agartha when I started next to Lanka, Hinnom and Helheim (ie. I'd have been dead in 10 turns if I didn't have the option to give my neighbours several free hammers, which is the item they'd want the most in the first 20 turns).

So without hammers as bargaining tools, the weak Earth nations are more boned than ever. And each nation will likely require a complete re-write to make them competitive again in a hammer free world. As no amount of small tweaks will do it IMO. Neither will a forge bonus on mages, as it was the ability to "give hammers" that was the key to their early diplomacy options against uber neighbours. All IMO of course

[Tryfan]

Can you use both 1.6 and 1.7 in the same install?

I want to start a new game but I have old games running 1.6 right now, I don't want to have to fight with things to make them all work together.

[iRFNA]

I'm doing it, and it works fine.

[rdonj]

As long as both mods are not enabled simultaneously you will be just fine. Mods in dominions are only switched on and off inside the game, so it's really easy to avoid conflicts... just make sure you switch off all mods other than the ones you want on before starting a new game.

[XuanZue]

i don't understand this change: :confused:

Jade Knife, Saguine Dousing Rod and Dwarven Hammer unique

[Squirrelloid]

i don't understand this change: :confused:

Jade Knife, Saguine Dousing Rod and Dwarven Hammer unique

Unique as in requires Constr 8 and you can only have one.

Or did you mean you don't understand why?

Jade Knife: blood sacrifice is already twice as effective as its supposed to be, so in effect you sort of get a free jade knife with every priest anyway. Letting you compound that with an actual jade knife was just crazy town.

SDR: its a gem gen, and like other gem gens, not good for the game.

Hammers: QM argues its because hammers were necessary to play the game, forced many nation's pretenders to look sort of similar (need E3 capability somewhere), and caused E gems to be over-valued and used on hammers to the exclusion of everything else - and on top of that they add a lot of micromanagement for forging. I only really dispute the undesirability of the last part, but that's why he did it.

[Dimaz]

SDRs being a gemgen is just bs and even qm admitted in irc that they're just "have similar properties". Gemgens reproduce exponentially without upper bound while SDRs don't produce anything by themselves and have upper bound of approx 3*number of provinces suitable for hunting, so their effect is proportional to your gem income from sites (both are proportional to total number of provs you own), unlike true gemgens.

[DeadlyShoe]

Well, it's a gem generator with a limit. It's still something you put gems into and get more gems back in the long run.

[Dimaz]

The biggest problems with gemgens as I understand are 1) they can grow unbounded (well, limited to producing 50/turn in the end) which encourages turtling 2) their income is hidden. Both of them don't exist for SDRs. Thus SDRs are not gemgens, both by their effect (previous post) and by their issues.
And summoning units/casting spells with gems during conquest is definitely gem generator by your definition. You put gems into it and gain more gems in the long run from captured provinces. Let's ban capturing provinces, then.

[DeadlyShoe]

That's ridiculous and you know its ridiculous. :P

[rdonj]

He's right that they're not really gem gens though, which is the main point. I think the more important reason for making the SDR unique is that blood is a bit too strong, and that's the easiest way to nerf it. I can't blame QM for preferring to unique dousing rods than to change and balance the costs of all blood spells to try and balance blood out.

[Dimaz]

I agree, removing SDRs in such widely used and important for the community mod without warning is ridiculous. Gemgens were removed after much debate AFAIK and they were considered broken by vast majority back then which the vote in another thread shows, not so with SDRs.
Seriously, it really irritates when people call something only remotely close "WARNING! GEMGENS" and use it as an excuse to remove it from game. I feel that options should be removed from the game only if they are seriously broken.

[DeadlyShoe]

Um, if it's not a gem generator, what is it? It has no purpose but generating gems over time. It's just much more limited in potential and use than the others, which is presumably why it lasted so much longer before getting nerfed.

Noone is against things just because they are gemgens. I.E. Eternal Pyre and similar spells are blatantly gem generators but noone is saying to take them out.

[llamabeast]

Actually Dimaz, I think the community was a bit outraged about the loss of gem gens at the time, but gradually came to see it as a change for the better.

I think basically, blood and blood sacrificing are both severely overpowered. Removing SDRs (and Jade Knives) is an effective way to mitigate that, while having the added side effect of removing some micro, and allowing Blood nations to start their research with something other than Const 4.

[Dimaz]

The game that Xanatos (IIRC) tried to start with CBM 1.5 short after the 1.6 release never started because there were only 4 or 5 players who wanted to join (including me). I think that shows the level of acceptance. I know some people that were against the change but it was sort of impossible to start the game with gemgens here at the time.
Blood being op is completely different matter than SDRs being gemgens or not. Actually I'm not sure that it needs external balancing even if it is op as usually it more or less balances itself in the game (especially with diplomacy). Also banning gemgens effectively made blood stronger so it's just the conseqence of previous decisions. And removing SDRs of cause nerfs blood but 1) unequally for different nations 2) it removes just another "investment" part of the game which is bad imo. They are sort of cheap for what they do I agree, 10B seems more adequate.

[quantum_mechani]

The fact that apparently there is still around 25% support for gem gens certainly supports the idea there was even greater division over them then.

I actually would not be that opposed to 10b SDRs instead of unique ones, but I think most of the issues would remain the same. Investment options are only interesting so long as they are just that, options. They make a lot more sense in a game designed to make strategic choices of that sort- and dominions is not that game. Investment options are so few, that they seem to either become mandatory choices or trivial effects. I tend to think this is because marginal resource advantages are not really what make or break rushes in general, you are almost never making the choice of much needed offensive options to expand vs. investment. Because there are so few investment options (even base game), you can easily soak the cost of all available investments and still be in very nearly as strong of a military position.

Anyway, that's my theory for why investment options always seem to be unavoidable or too marginal to consider in dominions, but it also seems a pretty unavoidable conclusion empirically.

[Corinthian]

I agree with quantum_mechani on this that the problem was not exponential investments, so much as it was the no brainer situation. Because lets face it: In a strategy game, EVERYTHING you spend resources on is an investment. You invest in troops to get provinces, you get provinces to get gold, you get gold to get troops.
The gem gens was too cheap and gave too good a return on the investment. It became far superior too more conventional early game strategies, like spamming low level summonings.

In the early game there is not a lot of spells that will put you in a better position, than hoarding gems, for casting higher level spells later, will do.

Also, clamming was not obvious to your neighbors, unlike a high province or gem income count. Witch would be the result of other kinds of investments. Therefore it prevented people from gauging your threat level and gang up on you before it was to late.

All of these things could be fixed by reducing the profit of the investment. In vanilla, a clam of pearl will pay for itself in 14 turns and could be made with hammers after researching const 2.

My solution is to make the gemgens worse investments. Lets change the cost of the clams from 15W 5N to 20W 5N and also change the construction requirements to const 6. Also if you are going to return the hammers, give it the "No forge discount" tag. This would change the rate of return from 14 to 25 turns. And by the time you reach const 6 there will be other high level spells to compete for the gems.

It will still pay for itself eventually, but it is no longer a no brain investment and will probably only be done by well entrenched turtlers, like underwater nations. Or by people that wanted const 6 for other reasons.

[llamabeast]

The trouble with that is that the appropriate cost depends on the size of game. For a small 4-player game, vey cheap clams would be appropriate, while for a huge game they should be very expensive in order to avoid being no-brainers. There's no cost which is appropriate for all games.

Apart from that, I think it's horrid that a player can be reduced to one sieged fortress, but still be effectively at full power because the fortress is full of clam bearers. It completely disconnects power from provinces and armies.

[rabelais]

Having trouble opening one of my 1.71 MP turns.

says myloadmalloc: cant open ./mods/./Worthy_heroes/Loki_1.tga with a nagot gick fel.

This can be a real problem with fortress battles, since I have no idea what happened. Advice? I tried putting the relevant .tga in with the cbm1.71 tga, but it had no effect.

[Dimaz]

In fact clams were only 2w 10 gems in d2, and so the cost and trouble to get them was hugely increased but still they remained very important part of winning strategies despite that, so I don't think any reasonable cost increase can change that. They should be somehow limited to the actual size of player's lands or gem income from sites to make them comparable with other investment options, unfortunately it can't be done with modding tools we have.

[quantum_mechani]

Having trouble opening one of my 1.71 MP turns.

says myloadmalloc: cant open ./mods/./Worthy_heroes/Loki_1.tga with a nagot gick fel.

This can be a real problem with fortress battles, since I have no idea what happened. Advice? I tried putting the relevant .tga in with the cbm1.71 tga, but it had no effect.I think you will have to to put the tga in the correct path (meaning create a worthy_heroes folder and put it there)... if the tga is not there automatically, it is definitely a bug.

[Kuritza]

The fact that apparently there is still around 25% support for gem gens certainly supports the idea there was even greater division over them then.

No it means that these who opposed your gemgen-purge initially still dont like it, and sometimes visit these boards out of nostalgy or something like that.
You seem to take it for granted that these who have played your mod for a while come to love all its features. Well, it's not necessary true. Make another poll if you wish - 'Did you change your opinion about gemgens over the last year?' - with answers like 'No / Yes, I like it without gemgens now / Yes, I have decided that removing gemgens was a lame solution.' Perhaps you will be surprised... perhaps I will. Seriously, that would be interesting.

Now, for the 'obligatory investments' thing. Yes, you need hammers to compete. Is it a bad thing? No. Is having fewer magic items a bad thing? Yes, in my opinion.
Need for hammers encourages either diplomacy or creativity. Initially, you just need one or two; later, any nation can forge them. Added micromanagement is also marginal.
You oversimplify the game.

[P3D]

I was looking at TC summons, esp. Celestial soldiers. They are sacred and nice, however, being a 6th level national summon, IMHO they merit some magic weapon. E.g. Obsidian glaive.

Second, TC only have troop summons. Perhaps the same Celestial soldiers could come with a commander -same unit, perhaps with H1 for self-bless. Or a separate summon.

All these would merit an increase of the spell cost and level.

[Corinthian]

The trouble with that is that the appropriate cost depends on the size of game. For a small 4-player game, vey cheap clams would be appropriate, while for a huge game they should be very expensive in order to avoid being no-brainers. There's no cost which is appropriate for all games.

This point I disagree with. Why? Because big games and small games also play very different in every other way. All actions in strategy games are investments. You can usually chose between quick investments that have a bad but fast payoff. Or you can make long, slow, investments that will make slower but greater payoff. A clam is a long term investment that is safe. It will always pay of after long enough time. The drawback is that it has a opportunity cost. The research points needed to get to const 6 could be spent elsewhere. Those gems and research points could free some unfrozen that could win you wars.

The clam is only a good investment if you live long enough for it to break even. (25 turns in my scenario.) You sacrifice part of your current power in order to gain a greater power down the line. Assuming you survive. And it is not certain that you could not have gained greater power by using your current power to take your neighbors provinces and gem income.

So what does this have to do with small games? Well small games are quick! Late game strategies like tarts and wish will be useless. Anyone that sacrifices short term power, in order to gain even more long term power, will be crushed by people that build troops and battle mages. By increasing the cost and research required to use clams, you delay the repayment and makes it a late game plan. Or rather a plan that come into fruitaition in the late game.




Apart from that, I think it's horrid that a player can be reduced to one sieged fortress, but still be effectively at full power because the fortress is full of clam bearers. It completely disconnects power from provinces and armies.

If that is your problem then you must hate Late Age C'tis.
I am playing them in a newbie game on the other forum. I have been at war with two other players for proximately two and a half year. I have been loosing that war for almost as long..... They can't kill me though because even though I only had two provinces left at the worst, I still had all my undead reanimators left. And because I had found quite a few death sites in the first year, they were quite many.

The enemy could raid away all my lands, take my gem and gold income, and yet none of that mattered. Because my upkeep-free priests could reanimate 42 upkeep-free tomb chariots each and every turn! My war making abilities are still on top and I could probably hod out at least another year against two enemies that control all my lands. Possibly two! :D

[Corinthian]

I was looking at TC summons, esp. Celestial soldiers. They are sacred and nice, however, being a 6th level national summon, IMHO they merit some magic weapon. E.g. Obsidian glaive.

Second, TC only have troop summons. Perhaps the same Celestial soldiers could come with a commander -same unit, perhaps with H1 for self-bless. Or a separate summon.

All these would merit an increase of the spell cost and level.

They do have the Huli Jing. Well they are pretty forgettable.

And also remember that the soldiers are sacred. You only need to bless the with a fire or death bless and they become magical.


What?..... Am I the only one that plays T'ien Ch'i as a sacred rush nation?

[Festin]

Actually, an almost perfect solution to the investment problem would be to limit the number of gemgens according to the number of provinces. For example, instead of being magic items, gemgens could be spells (simular to Domes and limited to one of a kind per province), or immobile summons, or even buildings.

But any of this is probably impossible to mod in. Too bad.

[PriestyMan]

Trust me, if we weren't restricted by mod commands, we would have solved it ages ago. but we are. so no point thinking of more solutions which cant be implemented.

[LDiCesare]

In fact clams were only 2w 10 gems in d2, and so the cost and trouble to get them was hugely increased but still they remained very important part of winning strategies despite that, so I don't think any reasonable cost increase can change that. They should be somehow limited to the actual size of player's lands or gem income from sites to make them comparable with other investment options, unfortunately it can't be done with modding tools we have.

Well, sea trolls (kings) are gem-gens, but they aren't much used that way since 55 gems is a quite steep price, and waiting 54 turns to get an investment back is quite long. I doubt people would clam with such long investments. Of course, astral pearls > water gems, but still.

And I agree with llamabeast that such things are game-size-dependant. Early game is way more important in a 4 player game than in a 12 player game.

What?..... Am I the only one that plays T'ien Ch'i as a sacred rush nation?
Do you imply they could be played differently??? But in EA the earlier summons are just better because they can be summoned faster.

[Redeyes]

If that is your problem then you must hate Late Age C'tis.MA Ermor is the worst, maybe a bit more likely to spam Clams too... in the pre-1.7 days.

[Dimaz]

I put the word reasonable for a reason. Of course you can make clams cost 65 water and 40 nature, but nobody will make them then. I meant that I don't think it's possible to balance them by ajusting the cost, they are either too powerful or useless, because of their mechanics. The only real solution is to limit their maximum number, but the only way to do it without house rules is to make them unique.

[llamabeast]

LA C'tis is a bit different. Sure it would be annoying trying to crush a fortress containing an endless supply of longdead. But eventually you'd just get better research and bring along an SC or group of mages that could kill unlimited undead. Massed longdead are only a problem in the early and mid games, so eventually the player who has provinces will win. Also there is no versatility - you cannot turn longdead into more mages or anything like that.

Massed clams, however, only become more valuable as the game moves into late game, and you can use the pearls to get more wish casters and make more clams and so on - there's no limit to how powerful you can get, trapped in your little fort.

[WraithLord]

...
Apart from that, I think it's horrid that a player can be reduced to one sieged fortress, but still be effectively at full power because the fortress is full of clam bearers. It completely disconnects power from provinces and armies.
Well, come to think of it isn't it the same with a player that summoned lots of tarts and equipped them as SCs and now has all of his summoned and equipped ubber army hiding in his last VP?- Yes, he has no income to speak of but he is a power to be reckoned with although holding just that one fort. In that sense this scenario is born out of previous greatness - meaning a player can't get there w/o being a substantial power in the game to begin with.

Naturally the fact that clams generate income is what makes the difference but in light of the example I gave I find that one fort + gem gens argument somewhat weaker (though still solid :) )

[DeadlyShoe]

Tartarians arn't any kind of economic power, you can't continue to generate armies with tarts. I suppose you could fort up with tons of Wraith Lords or other unit-generators, but the cost of building enough to actually build a worthwhile army in a reasonable # of turns is prohibitive.

[Kuritza]

With tarts, you can hope to break siege and try to re-conquer some land. With gemgens, you can keep summoning, but you are still losing because your opponent has BOTH gemgens and the land (hence money and recruitables). Am I missing something?

Just bring some siege golems to breach the walls.
When it comes to unbreakable castles, Pangaea is much more annoying (to the point of being unfair, in my opinion). Pangaean Pans are so gaean.

[DeadlyShoe]

... the whole point of it was that you retain economic power with gemgens, and in fact you remain almost 100% of your economic power with gemgens. Noone has any problems with a strong army forting up so that it can come out later.

[WraithLord]

I don't think that's the main issue with gem gens. IMO, The main issues are:
A. invisible income -> other players don't know if you're a sheep or a wolf in sheep's skin
B. Worse: clams+wish -> economy model is broken

Last fort + strong army is a different issue in dominions root caused by defender-go-first rule.

[DeadlyShoe]

It's intrinsic to strategy games that resources come from territory, and that territory can be attacked and must be defended. If you're able to put virtually all of your economy inside a single nigh-invincible fortress, a huge part of the game is essentially thrown out the window.

[Kuritza]

> Last fort + strong army is a different issue in dominions root caused by defender-go-first rule.

+100
Now, it would be just GREAT if Illwinter could make at least one more patch with just one more change: sieging army can put some extra effort after the walls are breached and destroy the castle completely. That way, defenders will actually attack ex-siegers who control the province now. Attackers dont get the castle (less benefit etc), but they actually have an edge in combat.

>> Out of the window etc.

It's also normal for strategies to have different ways of multiplying resources: through conquest or through investments in economy. By banning the investments strategy you throw a huge part of the game out of the window. ^^

[iRFNA]

Was this intentional or a mistake? (http://imgur.com/Y4ctq.png)

...now back to your regularly scheduled gemgen whining...

[llamabeast]

Good spot. Also the name of his sword is wrong (Nikatu's instead of Niklatu's).

[Executor]

I don't think the issue with gem gens is the invisible income, frankly I love that part, it's like turning off score graphs. And blood hunting doesn't show up on graphs either.

The problem is like stated above more clams more wishing part, which eventually ends up with a nation getting like 1000 free gems per turn.

Heheh, doe clams Are limited in a way, you can only forge 50 gem gens a turn. :)

Seriously doe, I love clams, but I consider them broken in certain games. I agree they should somehow be limited, which doesn't sound possible to be honest.

The other things that is grossly broken is invading a fort full of immortals, to be specific vampires. That just isn't possible. :)

It would be interesting if clams had horror mark ability, I wonder how that would affect their production..?

[rabelais]

I would like to say I have been paying extensively with 1.71 and I nowthink QM is correct to nuke hammers in the sense that they make lots of things obligatory in a bad way. Quite brave and he deserves kudos.

But until we can item mod to make things 25% cheaper across the board, I don't know how balance is going to work. Right now it doesn't particularly.

Looking forward to 1.8


In other news I think the archery nerf is annoying and selectively applied. It seems to have missed Sauromantia's poison archers for example. They have been upgraded to LB range? That seems fair.

I found what appears to be a bug in worthy heroes where do I send it?

[DeadlyShoe]

Might as well just post it here. On that note, the Fianna hero for Eriu (MN 1806) has 2 shields.

[P3D]

Bug: Bane blades - if the leader does not have undead leadership, the created soulless have to be left in the province. They should get some undead leadership, and it might make the item a bit more useful.

Some suggestions on Oceania:

EA Oceania Triton kings should be made amphibian (or have a land shape), and kitted out with some equipment, so they could be thugged cheaper.
Landshape on the Triton princes might also help.

Both EA and MA Oceania could also use some recruitable (even if cap-only) S1 astral mage.

[WraithLord]

EA Rlyeh's what's their name - mind lords (?) should have tentacle attack, it's thematic, implied by their sprite and will fix the absurd route to one mindless undead near bug. This should come with a small price increase.

[Fantomen]

I'd like to say I disagree with nerfing the forge lord from 50 to 25 forge bonus. It was the hammers that made the forgelord overpowered, since you could get 75 forge bonus guaranteed from very early on + a pile of almost free hammers.

Without the hammers the situation in very different, and 50% forge bonus seems quite balanced for the price you pay, not overpowered but still a reasonable choice for certain nations that craves more boosters than others.

With 25% forge bonus and no hammers the forge lord is pretty useless.

[NooBliss]

With 25% forge bonus and no hammers the forge lord is pretty useless.

Speaking of useless pretenders... Did anyone find a use to Prince of Death at 125 points?

[Stavis_L]

With 25% forge bonus and no hammers the forge lord is pretty useless.

Speaking of useless pretenders... Did anyone find a use to Prince of Death at 125 points?

??

It's still a flying, 0-encumbrance, high-fear, full-slots chassis with high dominion and high death. Maybe a *slight* reduction in cost, but if it goes too far, it quickly gets ubiquitous for anyone that wants a death + expansion pretender.

If you wanted to balance it via indirect cost modifications, you could instead reduce the base dominion to 1 (as most players want to give it awe as an expansion pretender) and drop the base cost, which would still leave it open as a death chassis that happens to generate low levels of undead chaff...of course there it's competing vs. the immortal liches, so it probably loses out.

[NooBliss]

And just how often did you see that chassis picked lately? With any success?
Its just a combat pretender with death magic now. Even Wyrm can offer better diversification, I think, and he's a better expander.

[P3D]

Gath (and Ashdod) have the evocation spell Strange Fire - AoE 3 Damage 8+ AP (3x undead/demon) at Evoc 4.
It won't get any use because of the forbidding path requirements (2S1F). It should be reduced to 1S so out-of-capital mages could cast it, maybe 2S.

[Dimaz]

Light of the Northern Star.

[P3D]

Light of the Northern Star.

And how does that help with having no cross-path FS mages besides the 1 in 50 chance in the capital?

I should have been more clear. The F requirement (or the S one) should be removed. S1 to S2 can be dealt with.

[Dimaz]

When I played Gath I had 3 sources of FS mages. They are pretty common. LoTS allows them to cast it.
With S only it will be too powerful imo.
Also, national spells not castable by national mages are not that uncommon.

[rabelais]

EA Ermor needs some sort of mage buff. maybe an extra s or a on the elders. (s more thematic,Air more useful) as the 1/160th chance of an a2 elder I have never seen and I like the nationa lot in SP... and/or a small chance of d1 on the regular augurs. they cant site search efficiently in death, as only the elders get it. Would leave the elder price the same as with mm1 and old they are still horrifying. could bump the regular augur to 90-100 depending on death chance.

Giving a nation healers with nothing to heal (old wont work, sacreds already recup) and putting recuperation on old people (which does nothing!) is just mean. You don't have to change it, I'm just saying.

[Slobby]

Bug: Bane blades - if the leader does not have undead leadership, the created soulless have to be left in the province. They should get some undead leadership, and it might make the item a bit more useful.

That's interesting never actually made a bane blade, but I was going to post how much I <3 the change to bane blades.

Summon bane.
Equip with boots of quickness and pendant of luck.
Give a wight retinue.

And off they go making a retarded amount of undead. Quite fun against the ai. :up: The banes and wights close in then make undead on the spot and the ai then cuts up the undead meaning the wights and banes are pretty much free and clear. :D

Something is a bit off though and not just with the undead leadership.

Bane = 4D
Wight = 2D
Bane Blade = 5D

I guess if BB were 4D that would work.

Also thematically I don't necessarily agree with BB giving UD leadership. And if it was granted to what end? That talisman that summons a skell only gives UD leadership 1 if I recall. Match that to the BB and you can cart around one of the newly dead which is useless. Leave the BB for undead and/or death/blood thugs.

[Executor]

You can't mass large amount of undead with BB, so UD leadership is pointless.
The soulless get killed in the first round they get reanimated in by the enemy, so you're left with only maybe a dozen at the end of the battle.
That's from my tests.

[Kref]

I think that MA Shynuyama got overpowered in CBMs with size 1 goblins.
With size 2 goblins the strategy of Shynuyana was logical: with low resources, spent gold on army recruiting less effective goblins, with many resources, recruite effective dai bakemonos; with that palyer should survive untill research in construction and buffing spells would allow to make thugs and SKs from bakemono sorceres. Bakemono sorceres has good range of magic skills, and just enough hitpoints to cut enemy ranks opponents single-handly. Low attack skill? Any brand is forgeable. Earth, fire and water allow both usefull buffs and forgeable equipment, so shynuyama can strike at full force right when buffing sorcerers with soul vortex is available (with rare +1 death random, with skullface, with 1 death gem booster, probably it is possible to give skullstaff and equip with other items to compensate the absense of shield - soul vortex is castable), before magic research for all nations will go high and cheap bacemono sourceres mage-fighters will receive competitors.
With size one goblins shynuyama also don't have problems with initial expansion: low-resource cost goblins are competitors to any heavy infantry. So, for me it looks like size one goblins in terms of difficulty at early, mid, and late game turn shynuyama from average - easy - average to easy - easy - average. I don't think it is good.

[Debaser8]

Why not just put gemgens on summonable creatures like that sea troll thing that cost money in upkeep? Also, make them desert if there is no money left (this might be impossible to implement). That way gemgens are capped by income/territory and can't be spammed indefinitely (well up to 50).

[P3D]

Why not just put gemgens on summonable creatures like that sea troll thing that cost money in upkeep? Also, make them desert if there is no money left (this might be impossible to implement). That way gemgens are capped by income/territory and can't be spammed indefinitely (well up to 50).

Good idea IMHO. Way to convert gold into gems.

[Soyweiser]

Found a bug:

#selectspell "Infernal Disease"
#fatiguecost 7
#end

7 should be 700.

[TheConway]

Why not just put gemgens on summonable creatures like that sea troll thing that cost money in upkeep? Also, make them desert if there is no money left (this might be impossible to implement). That way gemgens are capped by income/territory and can't be spammed indefinitely (well up to 50).

While putting the gem gen on a specific unit does help somewhat, it doesn't solve the problem of gems being turned into ever greater numbers of gems. Also, commanders _can't_ desert, so even if you were operating at a deficit you wouldn't need to worry about losing your gem supply. Non-commanders can't have gem generating abilities of course since they don't have an inventory. Thus, you still aren't limited by income/territory.

Before you ask, no you can't set a specific number of summons like the ele royalty, and no you can't make it so you can only have 1 summon per province. Simple price adjustments won't really solve the problem, since the cost/benefit is based on the size of the game. Not to mention that gem gens didn't really make "underpowered" nations all that much better since many power nations had little difficulty forging them themselves. If you really want to hash over gem gens again then search the forums for the 1.6 thread, there was plenty of drama over them in that thread IIRC.

[NooBliss]

Nobody uses sea troll kings as gemgens. I think it means that it's possible to find some golden mean when such creatures become good, but not dominant.

[Soyweiser]

Just because the Trolls take 55 turns to break even. In very large games I think I would use them as gen gems. And use all the "free" trolls to attack. (The additional troops add 50 gp upkeep, the sea king only 10).

But most mp games are rather small games.

I would support gengems as units with large costs (and perhaps additional units). Or immobile creatures. So you have point which can be attacked to destroy the gengems.

Question, do gems generated by units show up in the score charts?

[TheConway]

Question, do gems generated by units show up in the score charts?

No, this is also part of the problem, as it is possible for the graphs to be very misleading in terms of true gem income w/gem gens in the game. This is also a problem with blood, but that is far less easily fixed.

[Soyweiser]

Question, do gems generated by units show up in the score charts?

No, this is also part of the problem, as it is possible for the graphs to be very misleading in terms of true gem income w/gem gens in the game. This is also a problem with blood, but that is far less easily fixed.

True, but blood is counterable in other ways. Raiding to put the unrest up/kill the hunters, armageddon to destroy the population. Remote attack spells to increase unrest.

Removal of the SDR also decreases blood power.

[NooBliss]

>> Removal of the SDR also decreases blood power.

Mostly for non-blood nations.

[TheConway]

Not really that much. Non-blood nations couldn't really do blood as much more than a sideshow, and having your main bloodhunter go from >50% chance to find a slave to <50% is significant (mictlan/lanka/hinnom/gath). However, Vanheim is a very sad panda now. Its true though that nief/aby/mari/ulm don't really lose out on much.

[Soyweiser]

Also add Jotunheim to the list.

You could get b1 Vaetti hags, with a SDR effective hunters. Without, not so much.

Sure they also have 250 gold possible hunters. But that is the more expensive option.

Another thing with the SDR was that is gave "free" blood slaves after 3(hammer)/5 turns. So after 5 turns each hunter with a SDR would get an additional slave. So you would even put SDR's on high blood level hunters.

[NooBliss]

Dont put Jotunheim in. The more expensive option is still an option.

[Soyweiser]

Sure, the more expensive option is an option. But it still decreases their power.

Just like the increase in gold for the Niefel Giant decreases the power of Niefelheim.

You need to spend more gold in upkeep to get the same amount of slaves as Jotun. So it decreases their blood power.

[Jarkko]

During CBM 1.6 there was talk about reducing the Carrion Woods global for LA Pangaea (while keeping the price thematically high for EA and MA). Seems it is however still 90 gems even for LA Pangaea, which is so high that LA Pangaea will never (be able to) cast it. Carrion Woods is an early game spell which is useless in mid-late game, and it could take ~60 turns to collect the gems for for Carrion Woods in LA (in EA and MA much faster; if you take a pretender that can get CW up, it will be up at around turn 15), because it is much more important to get up Mother Oak up first for LA Pan.